I really enjoyed Gettysburg Surgeons by Barbara Franco. Her comprehensive research opened my eyes to the plight of the medical personnel who were at the side of the wounded, during and after the battle. The information that the author gave the reader covered everything that a person would want to know about these men. I found their educational histories particularly interesting. It made me glad that I live in the twenty-first century and not the nineteenth. Most importantly to any reader who loves Gettysburg history, she puts us in the hell that was battle time medicine.
Thank you to NetGalley and Stackpole Books, for the opportunity to review this book. I received a complimentary copy of this book, and I freely left this review.

This was an excellent book. It was well-written.
At times it was hard to read but it's worth reading.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC.

If any Civil War history book mentions battlefield surgeons, they’re usually portrayed in a somewhat negative light. Their knowledge is limited, their tools primitive, and their cursory diagnoses often end with them crudely hacking limbs off the wounded and tossing them into a ghoulish pile.

Barbara Franco has done extensive work researching, identifying and - perhaps most importantly - humanizing all of the surgeons who served at the Battle of Gettysburg. This book detailing her efforts is a scholarly one, with an emphasis on facts and figures and details. But Franco also incorporates personal reminiscences from some of the 1,200 Union and Confederate surgeons who worked during and after the battle, quoting many of them at length, which helps to turn all of the raw material she gathered into an actual narrative.

As she tells it, the battlefield surgeons were “far from the unskilled butchers of popular stereotypes.” While they still served a little too soon to benefit from advances like germ theory and antisepsis, they were far more organized and professionalized in 1863 than those who provided medical care in the early days of the war. Each of them had to pass a strict entrance exam to become a military surgeon, so while they may not measure up to our modern standards, they had far more expertise and knowledge for the time than they’re typically credited with today.

Before the battle, they’re portrayed here as doing much more than just waiting for combat injuries to treat. They pushed for medical supplies to be prioritized, when generals were more concerned about the flow and transport of food and weapons. They advocated for cleanliness and healthy rations in camp in order to prevent diseases. And with such a large army, they invariably had to tend to those who needed routine medical treatment. Yet with limited time and resources, the doctors often simply did the best they could. As one recalled, “Early in the morning we had sick-call… Diagnosis was rapidly made, usually by intuition, and treatment was with such drugs as we chanced to have.”

As the battle begins, Franco describes it from the perspective of the surgeons. The first day was relatively orderly, as they set up field hospitals and treated the wounded. But they soon became overwhelmed - not only because of the sheer number of wounded and the severity of the injuries they had to treat, but because they frequently had to move the location of their field hospitals in order to stay out of the way of the battle, they had to keep themselves safe while under fire, and they had to evade capture, as some surgeons would be taken prisoner along with their comrades and pressed into service by their captors (and there was disagreement over whether surgeons, as noncombatants, could be kept as prisoners at all).

When the battle ends, the book is only halfway over, as “the long arduous work of caring for the wounded was just beginning.” This is a part of the Gettysburg story that’s not often told - as the two armies left, they had to take many of their medical professionals and supplies with them, anticipating future battles and additional casualties, so they “left only the limited amount of surgeons and supplies that could be spared” to treat the many wounded who remained in Gettysburg.

A more permanent field hospital was established, and lasted for months after the battle. Volunteers stepped in to provide assistance to overworked surgeons who were often “criticized for lack of empathy and concern for the wounded.” The volunteer medical workers and nurses, in contrast, were able to sympathize with their patients “on a more personal and emotional level.”

Once the remaining patients were either discharged or transferred to established hospitals in nearby cities, the Gettysburg surgeons’ work was finally done. The narrative loses a little steam in tracking their postwar lives, as everyone’s story is different, and it becomes a collection of mostly unrelated anecdotes. Franco does her best in organizing these anecdotes by theme, but there’s no consistent through-line from their shared experiences at Gettysburg to their experiences after the war. “The sheer volume and severity of cases encountered in battlefield medicine” helped many surgeons become well-prepared for improved, more effective and advanced medical care in postwar private practice. But just as many seemed to leave the profession altogether, getting into business or politics or failing to successfully transition to civilian life at all.

As the book nears its end, the narrative becomes more poignant as, decades later, one surgeon who thought he and his colleagues were overlooked and forgotten gave a speech entitled “Why Is The Profession of Killing More Generally Honored Than That of Saving Life?” And soon after that, Franco describes how Gettysburg’s surgeons finally got a measure of respect and recognition when only a handful were left to appreciate it.

In her introduction, Franco explains that she set out to focus on “the experiences of individual physicians as members of a profession,” as opposed to the state of medical knowledge at the time or the impact of care. Focusing on the latter is what tends to reinforce the image of Civil War battlefield surgeons as uncaring, limb-hacking barbarians. Focusing on the former, as Franco does, helps us to understand and empathize with the surgeons who typically play little more than a supporting role in most battle histories. For that, whether you are a novice or an expert on the Battle of Gettysburg, this book is an important and enlightening read, proving that all of Franco’s research was well worth it.

This was an interesting historical book with lots of details, dates and information about the surgeons of Gettysburg. Viewing the battle of Gettysburg through the viewpoint of the surgeons was exactly as I hoped it would be. Informative experience through the surgeons lens. I did find it hard to follow at times. I am very happy to have this advance copy opportunity from Net Galley.

This book on the surgeons who worked at Gettysburg is a detailed and meticulously researched account of a lesser-known aspect of the battle. The sheer number of surgeons working gives a remarkable insight into the battle itself - 1000 for 25000 injured people. It was also intriguing to read that surgeons were taken prisoner, too. Finally, I really enjoyed the biographies of the Gettysburg surgeons at the end of the book.

Gettysburg Surgeons: Facing a Common Enemy in the Civil War's Deadliest Battle is based upon a ten year research study (prosopography) performed by the author, Barbara Franco, about the Surgeons of Gettysburg during the civil war including such information as where these surgeons came from, what challenges they faced, and what happened to them during and after the war.

Some of the things this extensive non-fiction work examines:

- The ages and qualifications of the surgeons such as what routes of study they had taken and where they studied.
- The medical treatments of the time.
- The prevailing approaches to medicine.
- The lacking resources available.

The types of issues dealt with such as:

- Health and disease: Chronic diarrhea, dysentery, scurvy, scabies, tetanus
- Gunshot wounds, secondary hemorrhage
- Alcohol and drug abuse
- Sickness from foods or lack of specific foods.
- The importance of clean water.
- Death.

It also includes excerpts from letters and diaries and examines their lives after the war.

As someone with a background in healthcare, and as someone who has visited Gettysburg Battlefield, I found it very interesting to read. The accompanying pictures also provided a wealth of information.

About the Author:
Barbara Franco, a nationally recognized leader in the museum field, has served as executive director of the Historical Society of Washington, DC, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and the Gettysburg Seminary Ridge Museum.

Globe Pequot Publishing Group, Inc.
July 1, 2025

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