Civil War
At the start of the Civil War, Letterman was assigned to the Army of the Potomac. He was named medical director of the Department of West Virginia in May 1862. A month later William A. Hammond, Surgeon General of the U.S. Army appointed him, with the rank of major, as the medical director of the Army of the Potomac itself. Letterman immediately set to reorganizing the Medical Service of the fledgling army, having obtained from army commander Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan the charter to do whatever was necessary to improve the system. The army reeled from inefficient treatment of casualties in the Seven Days Battles in June, but by the time of the Battle of Antietam in September, Letterman had devised a system of forward first aid stations at the regimental level, where principles of triage were first instituted. He established mobile field hospitals to be located at division and corps headquarters. This was all connected by an efficient ambulance corps, established by Letterman in August 1862, under the control of medical staff instead of the Quartermaster Department. Letterman also arranged an efficient system for the distribution of medical supplies.
Letterman proved the efficiency of his system at the Battle of Fredericksburg, in which the Army of the Potomac suffered 12,000 casualties. After this show of proficiency, his system was adopted by other Union armies and was eventually officially established as the medical procedure for the entirety of the United States' armies by an Act of Congress in March 1864. The greatest casualties for his army were suffered at the three-day Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. To deal with more than 14,000 Union wounded, along with 6,800 Confederate wounded who were left behind, a vast medical encampment was created northeast of Gettysburg off the York Pike on the George Wolf farm, named "Camp Letterman."
After a brief period of serving as Inspector of Hospitals in the Department of the Susquehanna, Letterman resigned from the army in December 1864 and relocated to San Francisco, California, where he served as elected coroner from 1867 to 1872. He published his memoirs, Medical Recollections of the Army of the Potomac, in 1866.
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Famous quotes related to civil war:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“One of the greatest difficulties in civil war is, that more art is required to know what should be concealed from our friends, than what ought to be done against our enemies.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)