- Joined
- Feb 5, 2017
From the National Museum of Civil War Medicine
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. vividly described a trip over the Antietam battlefield in the days after the September 1862 fight:
"The whole ground was strewed with fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of bread and meat.
I saw two soldiers' caps that looked as though their owners had been shot through the head.
In several places I noticed dark red patches where a pool of blood had curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured his life out on the sod."
Holmes was searching for his son, an officer in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry who had been wounded at Antietam on September 17. The doctor turned writer documented his search for his wounded son in an article published in the December 1862 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.
Read "My Hunt After the Captain" here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/12/my-hunt-after-the-captain/308750/
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. vividly described a trip over the Antietam battlefield in the days after the September 1862 fight:
"The whole ground was strewed with fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of bread and meat.
I saw two soldiers' caps that looked as though their owners had been shot through the head.
In several places I noticed dark red patches where a pool of blood had curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured his life out on the sod."
Holmes was searching for his son, an officer in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry who had been wounded at Antietam on September 17. The doctor turned writer documented his search for his wounded son in an article published in the December 1862 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.
Read "My Hunt After the Captain" here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/12/my-hunt-after-the-captain/308750/