gary
Major
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2005
Van Norstrand was the surgeon of the 4th Wisconsin Infantry. He was present when the first attempt to dig a canal to cut off Vicksburg was attempted under Gen. Thomas Williams (per orders of Ben Butler).
1st, Get a good penman and book keeper; he will relieve you of your duties that it will take you six hours a day to perform as regulations require, and by keeping close accounts with your Quartermaster you will have a hospital fund that will be ample to buy all the delicacies your sick will want or the market afford.
2nd, Take no cots with you, they will soon be broken, and if you occupy a post long, 400 feet of lumber, and with the help of two men, one day, will give you all the cots you need...
3rd, Get a strong, compact cook stove, and some strong furniture.
4th, Don't have much baggage; if you do, it will cost you much trouble; fifty blankets in summer and one hundred in winter is enough. Then your bandages and lint, with a small supply of miscellaneous medicines, with plenty of quinine and opium, all packed in not more than six, light, strong pine chests with iron straps and good locks, and you are all right. If you have a good set of instruments, better take them; most of the Government instruments are poor.
When our regiment first leaves home, you will of course have no hospital fund, but your Quartermaster will advance what you need to buy with for the sick, and have it taken out when you settle at the end of the month. If he is too narrow to do it, you must buy with your own funds, taking bills of purchase for all you buy, and present them to your Quartermaster, and he must pay them if he owes the hospital.
The regiment that has lost the most men of any regiment that I have ever been stationed near, never kept a hospital account or had a hospital fund - a sufficient explanation of the great mortality prevailing in it."
Taken from pages 108-9 of Michael J. Martin's, A History of the 4th Wisconsin Infantry and Cavalry in the Civil War.
1st, Get a good penman and book keeper; he will relieve you of your duties that it will take you six hours a day to perform as regulations require, and by keeping close accounts with your Quartermaster you will have a hospital fund that will be ample to buy all the delicacies your sick will want or the market afford.
2nd, Take no cots with you, they will soon be broken, and if you occupy a post long, 400 feet of lumber, and with the help of two men, one day, will give you all the cots you need...
3rd, Get a strong, compact cook stove, and some strong furniture.
4th, Don't have much baggage; if you do, it will cost you much trouble; fifty blankets in summer and one hundred in winter is enough. Then your bandages and lint, with a small supply of miscellaneous medicines, with plenty of quinine and opium, all packed in not more than six, light, strong pine chests with iron straps and good locks, and you are all right. If you have a good set of instruments, better take them; most of the Government instruments are poor.
When our regiment first leaves home, you will of course have no hospital fund, but your Quartermaster will advance what you need to buy with for the sick, and have it taken out when you settle at the end of the month. If he is too narrow to do it, you must buy with your own funds, taking bills of purchase for all you buy, and present them to your Quartermaster, and he must pay them if he owes the hospital.
The regiment that has lost the most men of any regiment that I have ever been stationed near, never kept a hospital account or had a hospital fund - a sufficient explanation of the great mortality prevailing in it."
Taken from pages 108-9 of Michael J. Martin's, A History of the 4th Wisconsin Infantry and Cavalry in the Civil War.
Bringing the