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Great Civil War doctors on both sides

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In a letter to the Rev. Dr. Henry Riddle, Major-General Paul Hawley, the chief surgeon in the European Theater of Operations during World War II, wrote, “There was not a day during World War II that I did not thank God for Jonathan Letterman.” This further confirms what Scott Beveridge wrote in a Sept. 16 feature about Letterman, who has been called “the father of battlefield medicine” and was a Canonsburg native.

The Confederacy also met the challenge of the first modern war with highly destructive weapons. Dr. Samuel Preston Moore, the Confederates’ surgeon general, also did what Letterman did for the Union Army. According to the available records, the level of care in the hospitals was comparable on both sides.

Moore also published “The Confederate States Medical and Surgical Journal” in 1864, emphasizing the importance of military medicine research.

This savage war was fought among brothers; we should take pride in knowing that there were great American doctors on both sides.

Jer-Yuan Tsai

Waynesburg

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