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Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, "The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
I was groomed to become one of his wives.
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Lindsay Prevett about her book titled the Surgeon's How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. This book takes us into the Vicksburg campaign of the US Civil War in the mid-1800s, which doesn't sound great. We're talking about soldiers marching a very long way through some not super healthy sounding land.
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Right?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
We're talking about heat, we're talking about mosquitoes, we're talking about, I mean, obviously soldiers marching. So there's dirt involved and there's soldiers. There's a lot going on which suggests that this is Not a context in which kind of nice, clean hygienic medicine is going to be easy to sort out. And this book helps us understand what did actually happen on the medical front, what that meant for this campaign, what that meant for the war. And I think we're also probably going to talk about what that meant sort of more broadly for the medical profession and ideas of health. So clearly a lot for us to discuss. Lindsay, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Thank you so much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why, why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Yeah, well, so as, as you said, I'm, I'm Lindsay. I have grown up for most of my life, really, really fascinated about the American Civil War. I was one of those nerdy kids whose parents would take me to battlefields as a child. And, and I actually am from Vicksburg, Mississippi. That is my hometown. So the battle in particular kind of dominated large over my evolution as a historian, if you will. The summer after my senior year in high school, I actually took a job for the National Park Service, working as a ranger at the battlefield at Vicksburg and just fell in love with the battle and the history and the nature in the park and all of that, all the more. So I knew pretty early on that I was interested in going into academia. I knew I wanted to write, I wanted to do research. So it was actually when I was working on my PhD and I was kind of casting about for a dissertation topic that my advisor actually pitched the idea of doing a Vicksburg style project and merging that with another really huge interest that I had, which was about the medical care of the war. I'm fairly convinced that we haven't really explored everything there is to explore about what medical care during the war was like, what the experience was like for both providers and patients. And so this was really an opportunity to meld both of those interests together and, and kind of see what the historical record would lead me to as I kind of started this project.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's always interesting to hear about the origins of a project. So thank you for that introduction. Thinking then, about the origins of the medical profession going into the key period of the book. What was the medical department and why, by the spring of 1862, was it seen as really not doing particularly well, both from the practitioner as well as the patient side?
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Yeah, so. So we have two things that are melding together here. One, as you said, is, is the medical department, which Is the branch of the army that is over kind of the healthcare of soldiers that are in that army. And ideally the medical department exists both in wartime and in peacetime. And one of the things that is always important to kind of remember is that the United States army is not in 1860, middle of the 19th century, it's not near as big as it is now. So prior to the Civil War, it was actually quite small. But you would still have a medical department that would have surgeons and assistant surgeons whose goal would be to treat diseases, general sicknesses, moderate complaints. I was out marching and I fell and I sprained my ankle. Anything from those kinds of complaints all the way to I was in an engagement, I've been shot, or I have some of these other kind of serious injuries. So we have that kind of in play. And the other kind of piece of this equation is the medical profession in general and how that has been evolving throughout much of the 19th century. The medical profession in general is actually really going through a very tense time in those early decades of the 19th century. It is kind of coming into conflict with some more, one might call them, like democratic medical theories, homeopathy. There's like a medical center sect called the Thompsonians, handful of, of different kinds of thinkers that are really kind of challenging these orthodox physicians and how they practice medicine. And so the mainstream kind of medical community is really thinking about how to assert its authority, how to prove itself kind of authority effective on the national stage. And along with these questions, they're thinking about issues like treatment. How effective are their treatments, how are they hindered by limited medical knowledge of the time, of the era, what kind of licensing laws or educational opportunities there are to trained physicians. And so all of those things are kind of coming together right here at the Civil War. And when the war kind of breaks out, for the most part it's assumed that the war is going to be very short lived. In fact, the, the Surgeon general who is the head of the medical department when the war breaks out in April of 1861 and then the end of that fiscal year in June, kind of brags that he got the medical department in under budget for that fiscal year. So there's a lot of kind of assumptions that this is going to be fairly straightforward, fairly shortly lived war. And then we have our first big battle at Manassas, which is in July of 1861. And, and all of these doubts about the medical profession seem to kind of become like a self fulfilling prophecy. This battle ends in complete chaos, particularly on behalf of the Union army and newspaper reporters write home about how the federal troops can kind of fall apart on the field, but they also are particularly paying attention to surgeons. And it seems like in every way that surgeons were supposed to support, support soldiers as they were marching into battle, making sure that they were as physically fit as they could be, and then caring for them when they got injured and all of these, these different efforts. Surgeons seemed to kind of consistently be failing at their jobs. And so there's this kind of experience or assumption in the wake of Manassas that the medical department is more or less kind of functioning as a failure in this instance. And that kind of puts them in a position where they are now trying to reclaim their reputation in the eyes of the general population, but also the soldiers that they're serving as. Well.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that definitely is not a position that the surgeons are just like, yeah, this is fine, we can work with this. Like, clearly something needs to change. So what were the steps undertaken by the medical department to reform this? And at least initially did. Was there any improvement?
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Yeah, so, you know, the, the story of Civil War medicine is very interesting. And you can look at a couple of different venues of how the medical department, of what the medical department is doing. You can think in terms of how surgeons and medical officers take care of sick bodies, so disease, how they take care of injured bodies, so bodies that have received like a traumatic injury in battle. And then we have this managerial aspect of things. And it really has been widely embraced, I think, by scholars that the managerial aspect is where Civil War surgeons, where the medical corps really makes the most impact both on the war, but also kind of moving forward in the legacy that they impose on the way military medicine is practiced. So in the spring of 1862, we get a new surgeon general appointed. His name is William Hammond. And Hammond is a. He is a career, a medical officer. So he hasn't just enlisted for the war. He actually had functioned as a member of the medical corps for many years. He had left the army and then he re enlisted when the war broke out. But he's also a reformer at heart. So he's kind of at the forefront of thinking about some of these processes, how to fix things, how to not just care for soldiers better, but also how to leverage surgeons experience during the war into bettering the profession itself. And so Hammond is going to start to initiate a handful of different kind of reforms. His are often focused on things like medical supplies. So for example, one of the issues in the medical department is that even though surgeons and medical directors carry A rank title like general. They don't actually have a field rank. They're not in the order of command. So when they show up at a commanding officer's tent during battle and they say, hey, I need X, Y and Z supply from the quartermaster, and can you give me so many wagons to get wounded men from Y to Z, there's nothing that says that that officer has to listen to them. So one of the things that Hammond really begins to do is kind of setting up the medical department to kind of operate autonomously. So moving medical stores, supplies, wagons that will function like ambulances out from underneath that commissary department and into the medical department so that medical officers are not dependent on other commanders to kind of agree with them, to take time and to send off orders on their own and things like that. The other really big thing, reform wise, that happens and also happens here in the middle of 1962 or 1862, is Hammond appoints a man named Jonathan Letterman to be the new medical director of the army of the Potomac. And that is your big Virginia Army. And Letterman also has an eye for organization, especially personnel organization. He's really kind of skilled in this area. And so Letterman has two really important advances that he does in 1860, 62. One is the creation of the ambulance corps. So wagons that specific purposes are to be used as ambulances with trained drivers who run drills to go and get patients who are incapacitated in the field, under fire, retrieve them, and to get them to the back to the back lines where they can be triaged and they can be treated. And surgeons can then decide ultimately whether they stay with their command, whether they need to be evacuated. And that ambulance corps first appears at the Battle of Antietam in the early fall, late summer, early fall of 1862. And then the other thing that Letterman does is hospitals. He kind of sets up a tiered hospital system that moves patients through and triages them according to the severity of their wounds as a way to streamline the treatment process. And both of those are actually so incredibly successful, the hospital system emerges and, and is first used at Fredericksburg in December of 1862. They're actually both so successful, they'll be widely adopted throughout the Union army by the end of the Civil War. And Letterman traditionally goes on and he receives the moniker of the father of battlefield medicine. They kind of set up these processes that armies will then use well on as we transition into the 20th century.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay. Yeah, those are some pretty big changes both immediately and with longer term aspects. But of course the challenges you mentioned at the beginning, like they're not. That doesn't fix all of them.
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Like what kinds of challenges are remaining both practically and with this whole soldiers being mad at the surgeons and assuming that they can't do their jobs?
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Yeah. So like I said, the managerial is a very, are very important changes and they have a lasting impact, but they at all do not kind of solve all of these issues. Disease will continue to be an issue throughout the rest of the war. And I will say that this is one area as much as we want that and everything changed for the better. Narrative and solutions were found to all of the problems. Disease in particular is one where that's not going to happen. The Civil War is on the eve of, of the creation discovery of germ theory. So we have doctors that are talking potentially about unseen things that may be affecting the body. But in terms of making them sick or making them incapacitated or contributing to things like infection, but in terms of that being widespread and extreme accepted, it's not going to be anywhere where it is by the end of the 19th century. And then of course we really don't have surgeons have a pharmacopoeia, they have a set of drugs that they will go to to try to treat ailments, but nothing anywhere near as effective as what we're used to now. And of course the big thing that will end up being discovered in the 20th century, that will really change the name of a game. Name of the game, especially in terms of infection is going to be penicillin in the discovery of antibiotics, neither of which these surgeons have at the start or at the end of this war. So when soldiers are looking at surgeons abilities to care for their bodies or soldiers bodies, they're still greatly hindered by the times. So one of the things, one of the instances that I talk about think it's chapter two, the Union army in its effort to try to kind of take Vicksburg. At one point the head of the Army, General U.S. grant, decides that he wants to try to reroute the river away from Vicksburg. And that involves this huge canal project. This project's conducted in the middle of winter. It's January to March of 1863. It is cold, it is constantly flooding, there is mud Everywhere, sanitation is an utter disaster. Right. All of these things that improve knowledge about bacteria and viruses. We would have helped surgeons do their jobs better or good treatment. Good antibiotics, some antiviral medication, you know, treatment would have helped them do better. And soldiers, what soldiers see is surgeons who are consistently, at best, ineffectual at managing what is becoming a growing health care crisis. And at worst, soldiers will perceive a general disinterest in the suffering that they and their comrades are experiencing. And so that's really the origin of a bit of a conflict, a contest between surgeons and their healthcare providers in terms of how effective surgeons can do their jobs and also how much surgeons care about doing those jobs. I'm becoming more and more convinced that one of the things that soldiers want and need the most is someone to see their suffering and to not only kind of honor that suffering, but. But to do everything they can to alleviate that suffering. And so there's this great offense taken when they feel like their suffering is not being honored in a particular way.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that makes sense. It is obviously about treating their bodies, but doing it a way that their minds can understand, too. Can we link this sort of more explicitly to military objectives? Right. Like, obviously, soldiers being happy, soldiers being taken care of obviously has military implications, but can we talk about kind of that link more directly?
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Absolutely. And I think that this is one of the things that is so difficult in that soldier surgeon interaction, because what many of them don't see is that surgeons kind of as medical officers are kind of stuck between professionally wanting to care for their patients, but they're also kind of an extension. Extension of what commanders are trying to accomplish through a military objective. So we kind of. I mentioned in the beginning that medical officers don't have any authority to change military objective. They can only advise and then work within the framework that they've been given them. So going back to that canal, that instance at the canal, and this tension is kind of replicated a handful of different areas in the book, but the canal is such a great example. The issue with the canal is that our commanding officers, Grant, who is head of the army of the Tennessee at this time, and then we have under him we have three corps commanders, one of which is William T. Sherman and John McClernand and James McPherson. They perceive the work that's being done on the canal as potentially being important enough that it is worth the sacrifice of the lives. So commanders are also kind of constantly in this negotiation of what is the objective? What is it going to take to get that objective done? And will the outcome warrant how many lives they have to extend, spend in order to accomplish the objective? And that is a very disconcerting way to think about people's lives. And if we're going back to thinking about soldiers who are kind of caught in this environment, who want their suffering to matter, because when you enlist in an army in wartime, you're not going to make the mistake of thinking that there isn't suffering and there isn't potentially death, but the sacrifice of that for that to matter, for the battle to be won, for the war to be won, that's the trade off, that's the negotiation. So what we often then get is this conflict between commanding officers who are like, who believe that the objective is worth the lives, and the men who don't believe that the sacrifice is worthy of this particular sacrifice is worthy of that objective.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I can see how that would be very tricky for all of them to navigate. And so thinking about those sort of soldiers, feelings like this doesn't sound like a great experience for them. Right. The worry that they're not being. Their sacrifices aren't being taken seriously. The physical impact of trying to stop a river, which is a pretty intense idea, how did this kind of impact them to have? It sounds like quite a lot of suffering.
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Yes. Particularly when we're thinking about the canal, there's quite a bit of suffering physically. So there are regiments who arrive at the canal when the project first starts that by the time you give them six weeks and they're like, we have 200 people out of original, a thousand people who can, like, show up and are fit for duty. So there's, there's immense physical suffering. And that's also one of the things that I noted as I started doing my research is soldiers were writing about health. The way that they measured health, I think, is also, and different than how I was measuring it. So I would have soldiers who would consistently write letters home and they were saying, you know, I'm very, I'm healthy, I'm, I'm not sick, you know. And then about a month later, they would write a letter home and then they would mention that they've had, they have diarrhea or dysentery and that they've had it for two months. So in my mind, if you have dysentery or diarrhea, that does not mean that you are healthy, then that means that you are, in fact sick. So even as I'm thinking about soldiers who are suffering on the canal, we have the sick list that's growing but we also have to take into account for men who are staying in camp because their illnesses or their symptoms haven't really increased enough to warrant them being on the sickly sick list or being incapacitated or something along those lines. So they're suffering in that way, but there's also immense suffering from morale, from an emotional standpoint. Right. Because even if you are the healthy one left in camp, you're watching all of your friends get sick, you're watching many of them die, and there's an impact of grief on that, but it also seems like there's just a matter of time until it comes for you as well. So it's a very bleak and kind of gloomy experience, these three months that they're working on this canal.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And was there anything that the medical officers could do to take care of soldiers in these conditions?
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
There would be some. Some ailments or some treatments. The effectiveness, I think, could be really debated. One of the most powerful drugs or popular drugs that would be used at the time would be quinine, which is generally used to treat fevers, broadly spoken. And in fact, as we get through the campaign, one of the things that Grant's. Grant wants his army to do is actually take quinine in an effort to prevent fevers. Now, the caveat that isn't really fully explored in their time is that the reason quinine is so popular is because it is actually a really effective, effective drug to treat malaria specifically. So in so far, if you have a fever that is because of the malaria parasite, which they don't know about, quinine absolutely is going to help with that. And another thing that they had was opium. If anyone has been on pain medicine for an extension extensively, long period of time, you'll know that one of the byproducts of that is constipation, which works really well if somebody is suffering from, for example, diarrhea. So there were drugs that help to alleviate specific symptoms. But in terms of really research restoring a body to its health, soldiers or patients, rather, really kind of needed to be pulled out of that local environment that was making them sick. And that's. This is something that surgeons recognize, it's something that soldiers recognize, and it's something that commanding officers are really kind of trying to measure against. If you send a sick soldier out of the environment, what do you lose? Do you lose body? Do you lose personnel? How long will it be before that soldier can be returned as a productive member of the command force? And that's actually a conversation that's beginning to really Create tension between soldiers, medical officers and commanding officers, because commanding officers are in charge of the decisions for furlough and discharge. Like the buck stops there with them and us. Grant is really going to make it his policy to keep soldiers with his command if at all possible. And one of the reasons that he does this is it's becoming more and more his experience that once a soldier is evacuated out of his kind of sphere of influence, if you will, out from his immediate command and put in a general hospital in say, Memphis or St. Louis, it becomes a lot more difficult to get that soldier back. And so he is always going to prefer to keep soldiers even when they're sick and even when they're wounded, if at all possible, in his command. And this actually even gives us a little bit of tension between Grant and the assistant Surgeon General who's operating in the West, a guy named R.C. wood, who throughout all of the canal project just keeps writing to Grant saying, hey, I have 200 beds available for you in Memphis. If you will just send these sick men to Memphis, we will take care of them. And Grant's just, it's not a trade off that he's willing to take.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. Okay. So that's helpful to understand from the kind of command side of things. Once then we're looking at the siege of Vicksburg. What does all of this kind of put together mean for what kind of medical conditions existed, what sort of medical organizations were like, how did this come together in that specific time and place?
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Dr. Lindsay Prevett
So one of the big things that happens that is really going to change perception of the medical corps is actually going to be the campaign. It's the thing that happens between that canal project we're talking about in the siege itself. Grant's army moves south through Louisiana. They cross the the Mississippi river and then they launched this like lightning campaign through the countryside. The army marches right around 200 miles over the course of 19 days. So it is very quick. And the army doesn't stop to build roads. So there's little method of evacuation, there's little method to get new supplies to the army. And that also means there's limited communication. So this, this campaign, one of the chief characteristics is that it is entirely isolated. So soldiers don't really have the ability to write home about their concerns for their health and have that be received before the camp. The siege actually begins. What ends up happening is when the army arrives in Vix, soldiers seem to be a lot healthier than anyone would have guessed. And it really reflects back on the medical corps who has implemented various kinds of strategies to both keep soldiers on their feet, to keep wounded soldiers taken care of until the army can arrive at Vicksburg and reconnect those supplies supply lines. Once the siege goes into place, then life kind of becomes similar and dissimilar to the canal. So we have an army, a huge army, about 75,000 strong, that's in a stationary environment. So a lot of those initial issues, Sanitation, for example, is going to reappear. So soldiers are going to start to get sick. Rates of diarrhea and dysentery go up. One thing that is unique to the siege, that doesn't exist during the canal is it's now summertime, which means that the mosquito population is flourishing, and they're bringing with it that malaria that we were talking about. Malaria is often at the time characterized as intermittent fever, if you will. So that's usually you won't see a diagnosis of malaria. You'll see a diagnosis of intermittent fever when surgeons are talking about it. So health begins to deteriorate. But the medical corps has developed a much more kind of complex hospital system. So we have core hospitals that are operating in the rear that are still going to be the preferred. Preferred place where men receive their treatment. But now that the Union army is connected back to their supply depot, which is on the Louisiana side, just kind of like northwest of Vicksburg on the Louisiana side of the river, Grant is more willing to allow the very sick and the very wounded to be evacuated out because he can get reinforcements. And that then kind of allows. Allows trade off so that men aren't necessarily stuck and mired in one position. And then the final thing is that morale, that emotional health that we were kind of talking about is that soldiers now have made it further to Vicksburg than any other army. And the fall of Vicksburg feels like it's inevitable. And Vicksburg is a huge linchpin in the Union war effort. Securing Vicksburg is, in 1863, one of the prime objectives. So as we kind of go back and we rethink about soldier suffering and what kind of value they're giving it, they're not at all convinced that. That moving the Mississippi river, using this canal is going to work. But by the time they get to these siege lines, they feel certain that Vicksburg's going to fall. It's more of a question of when. And so in many instances, you see them, they push their bodies a little bit further. There's not that same amount of animosity that they have with their commanding officers and their medical officers the way that they did just a few months prior.
- [39:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, because it's the whole idea that the sacrifice is worth something, which we were talking about. Yeah, well, that makes a ton of sense in terms Then of the military side of things, I think Vicksburg is already obviously seen as a military victory, an important one for the reasons you just outlined. You also talk in the book that we should see it as a medical victory as well, right?
- [39:22]
Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Yeah. So we have a couple of ways that we could view this as a medical victory. In fact, I would actually say that this, this is twofold. One is what the medical corps and the Union army manages to do. Right. And so part of that is keeping the general health of the soldiers intact so that they have the stamina to fight these reoccurring battles that happen throughout the campaign to arrive on the outside of Vicksburg. And, and the Union army actually tries twice to take the city of Vicksburg by storm itself before they kind of settle into those siege lines. So. So in all, throughout, throughout that campaign, given how isolated it is, there was an opportunity for soldiers health to just completely deteriorate. And that would have been absolutely disastrous for the Union army because there would not have been an easy way in or out of Mississippi had that happen. The medical corps is at least in part responsible for helping the army continuing to move forward without feeling the effects of soldiers who are wounded in battle, without feeling their effects of medical supplies shortening and being used elsewhere, medical personnel kind of being used elsewhere, things like that. And in doing so, when the medical corps, when the army arrives in Vicksburg, some of these civilian organizations that were really questioning whether or not the army could be trusted to care for soldiers bodies, these organizations kind of have a newfound trust in the medical corps, at least for the time being. And that really allows the army and these civilian organizations to kind of forge a bond to work together to help sick and wounded soldiers more than if any one of them were trying to accomplish this alone. But the unspoken part of this is also what the Confederacy doesn't do, which is all of that. The Confederate army. Soldiers in the Confederate army end up getting trapped inside of Vicksburg during this siege. And everything that the Union army has working in its favor, the Confederacy doesn't. They don't have the morale boost. They're slowly starving. They don't have the opportunity to retreat or spend time away from the front lines. Sanitation is deteriorating, just like in the Union army, but there's not the ability to forage for food or for fresh water. And then in addition to all of this, that friction that we see between medical officers and commanding officers are kind of just exacerbating the situation. So as, as Confederate soldiers get more and more sick the city itself ends up being flooded with sick soldiers to the point that medical officers who are operating these little hospitals within the city out of civilian homes and in their backyards start having to turn patients away because there's no room to keep any more sick people. And so slowly, the trench lines start filling up with Confederates sick. And eventually we get to the place where the. The commander of the Confederate forces is trying to decide whether his army. Whether enough people in his army are healthy enough to be able to fight their way out and. And just leave Vicksburg to the Federals. And the resounding answer by the time he starts asking these questions at the beginning of July is, is no. In fact, I think he has one division commander that says, my army won't make it five miles if they get out of these trenches.
- [43:46]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So that's a pretty not great position, I suppose, to be in, if that makes sense, but definitely impactful to understand historically. So thank you for helping us get some insight into what was going on. Is there anything in figuring all this out and putting it all together that surprised you? I'm especially curious, given how long standing your interest in the topic has been.
- [44:10]
Dr. Lindsay Prevett
I. So I think the thing that I keep going back to is how very bleak that canal is. You know, when you study Vicksburg and even when you go to the military park, the. The siege is easily interpreted for visitors. The campaign, which is kind of, you know, the. The precursor is easily interpreted. And these mesh together for Grant's kind of like, crowning victory of acquiring Vicksburg. But that's actually the fourth time the Union army has tried to take this city. And so studying the failed attempts are particularly interesting. I just can't get over the. Gosh, the hubris, if you will. In 1862 and 1863, we had Union generals looking at the Mississippi river, going, oh, I think that we can change its course. And so we won't even have to worry about fighting for Vicksburg if we can just, like, nullify this river issue entirely. But one of the things that really began to stand out to me as I started studying how bleak that canal was is as the flooding. So they're. They're living. There's not a lot of dry land. So the Mississippi river kind of overflows its banks, and then when it does, it pushes up all this silt, all that sand. And so there's all of these, like, interlocking natural levees on this area of Louisiana. And then when the river retreats, it kind of leaves water behind, and Kind of creates this interlocking system of bayous. And this is what they're living in amidst these bayous and these levees. And so the only dry lands, these levees. So that's naturally where you're going to pitch your camp, but that also means that you don't have any other dry land to bury your dead. And so I didn't realize that as more and more people died, the burial parties started burying dead soldiers in. Into the levees. And then as different areas started flooding and they had to start relocating their camp, they actually started moving the camps on top of the same levees that dead soldiers were buried into. And just the, the, the toll of that environment absolutely fascinates me. These were going to be some of the bodies that would ultimately be reinterred in Vicksburg National Cemetery a couple of years after the war. But I had always heard rumors from locals in Vicksburg. The Mississippi river changed course in the early 1870s. It actually takes the course that the Union army was trying to get it to take about 10 years earlier. But the, the rumor was always that, that locals grew up hearing their, you know, great grandparents and great, great grandparents talk about when the w. When the levies washed out, seeing fragments of the bodies that had been buried in the levies wash out of the levies themselves and down the river. And you. It's hard to kind of tell sometimes whether it's an apocryphal story or not apocryphal story. But that's such kind of a pointed end to this legacy of, of engineering and sickness and death that kind of captured this region during the war and
- [47:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
clearly for a long time after, too. Right. Those are some distinct and memorable legacies there. So thank you for telling us a bit about kind of some of the process of figuring all of this out. What, may I ask, are you working on now that this book is done? Anything you want to give us a brief sneak peek preview of?
- [48:16]
Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Yeah. So I am finishing up some of some of the last bits of the legacies of this project. One of the things that I became fascinated while working on this project, though, and you might have even heard it a little bit, even threaded through as I'm thinking about it, is this concept of how. How healthcare, how medicine, how the bleakness of so much of this, these experiences impacted the people who were there, who experienced them. And one of the things that I'm becoming even more interested in is telling the story from the perspective of healthcare providers themselves. I was editing this book in the middle of COVID And as we were beginning to have conversations and hearing stories from medical providers of what they were going through in these hospital settings with these huge epidemics and the toll that that took on them, both physically and emotionally, and some of the news footage coming out of some of the biggest cities, like in New York City, really reminded me of what some of my surgeons were writing about in the wake of battle. When they're standing in the middle of a field hospital and they have hundreds of thousands of wounded men all vying for their attention at one time, and they're trying to make these decisions on who do you go to first? How do you emotionally handle it when you have these cases where there's nothing you can do and you know that your patient is going to pass away? These questions of sacrifice and then even a little bit of this question of soldiers are very. It's very natural to see the sacrifices that soldiers get in battle and in the course of the war. But medical providers tend to be a little bit more hidden in the shadows, I think. So I think I kind of want to explore that direction as to how these men and women kind of were affected by the war, both during the war, but also what their veteranhood kind of looks like in the coming decades.
- [50:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that definitely sounds interesting to investigate. So best of luck with that. And of course, while you are pursuing it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Sergeant's How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the the Civil War, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. Lindsay, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [51:00]
Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Thank you. I so enjoyed it.
- [51:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
You're probably driving, working out, or doing chores right now.
- [51:18]
Dr. Lindsay Prevett
Quick tip.
- [51:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
TikTok isn't just entertainment. It's where I find fast, practical advice for real life. Download TikTok now.