One hundred and fifty-one years ago this past April 9, our nation’s bloodiest conflict mercifully ended. While it’s impossible to know definitively how many casualties occurred during a war which could have been avoided and left scars which remain unhealed, the consensus figures which follow are telling: Northern deaths – 360,000 and 250,000 from disease; Southern deaths – 258,000, with 165,000 from disease. That’s a total of 620,000.

We’ll never know how many more killed themselves in the war’s aftermath; veterans unable to cope with their morphine addiction – 1 million men left the service with the “soldier’s disease,” or with their demons – PTSD. In either case, they are victims of the war. We’ll also never know how many others died as a result of constitutions weakened from in-service battles with dysentery, typhoid, malaria and red measles. In the words of a Virginia volunteer, “I’d rather face the Yankees than the sickness.” (The Untold Civil War).

On Memorial Day in thousands of cemeteries located in country sides throughout the North and South, one can find among the lilacs gravestones marking the final resting places of the men who fought valiantly for their respective causes, stones whose faces ravaged by time and nature no longer bear their names. Perhaps under one in a hollow deep in the Appalachians lies the body of William Pope, whose last words to his messmate John Green were, “Johnny, if a boy dies for his country, the glory is his forever, isn’t it?”

The answer is yes, for every mother’s son who died for both countries. Perhaps under another lies in eternal repose Maj. Sullivan Ballou who, in a letter to his beloved Sarah, wrote, ” never forget how much I love you. And when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.” He took that final breath at Bull Run.

One can only wonder how many more monuments to the dead there would have been if it hadn’t been for two men, one a Billy Yank and the other a Johnny Reb, whose contributions saved an incalculable number of lives. Dr. Preston Moore, a South Carolinian, became Surgeon General of the Confederate army in the summer of 1861. By the time the war ended he had accomplished the following: established examining boards to weed out unqualified physicians, introduced regulations insuring that patients and wards were scrupulously clean, established diets for soldier-patients, combatted shortages in medicine by establishing pharmaceutical labs to produce medicinal substitutes (e.g. hemlock as a substitute for morphine), introduced the concept of the hospital “hut” which organized the sick and wounded into groups with the same ailment (forerunner of the modern ward system).

Under his direction, the medical corps was expanded to over 3000 physicians and his “Manual of Military Surgery” became a classic. In the final analysis, his department treated more than 3 million cases of wounds and disease among Southern troops and more than 200,000 cases of sickness among Union prisoners of war, thereby saving an untold number of lives.

Moore’s Union equivalent was Jonathan Letterman, the father of emergency medical care who in 1862, at 38, was designated the army’s medical director at a time when the medical treatment of Union soldiers bordered on the barbaric. Letterman immediately began instituting changes which still can be seen today. His greatest achievement was to form an independent ambulance corps to bring the wounded from the battlefield to medical stations, employing stretchers, hospital wagons and corpsmen trained to give first aid.

He established field stations where his system of triage (i.e. classifying casualties as lightly, severely or mortally wounded) kept battle sites from being completely overwhelmed with minor or hopeless cases. As an example of the impact of his innovations, c.10,000 Federals wounded in one day at Antietam were carried from the field and cared for within 24 hours. His emergency care system became standard procedure for the U.S. Army – a model for other military and civilian medical corps worldwide. The degree to which his influence was felt can be summed up in the words of the former surgeon-general for Allied forces in Europe; “There was not a day during WWII that I did not thank God for Jonathan Letterman.”

This Memorial Day, as we honor those who made the supreme sacrifice for this nation during its many wars, we’d do well to remember men like Preston Moore and Jonathan Letterman, whose contributions during the Civil War guaranteed that those sacrifices were far less than what they could have been.

Ray Lenarcic is a 1965 State University of New York at Fredonia graduate and is a resident of Herkimer.