One would suppose that a regional piece about the Civil War, dealing with only one county in Virginia, even a central one, would have little in the way of medical interest. On the contrary, since Charlottesville was an extremely important hospital center in the Civil War, and since it was the home of the school of medicine of the University of Virginia, more than half of the book is taken up with the Charlottesville General Hospital and its doings. A fascinating essay about it was written by Chalmers L. Gemmill of the Department of Pharmacology of the medical school.
As a native of Charlottesville, I was forced to hear more than one commencement address or oration at a Confederate reunion. Colonel Duke used to relate, with appropriate gestures, his boyhood recollections of the great pile of amputated limbs which festooned the immediate vicinity of the hospital in a most