Of the treatment for the wounded available even in the last months of the War , Adams had little praise. He was taken to another part of the field where he lay without shelter, almost unnoticed among the hundreds of other wounded collected there. So diligent was the North in certain aspects of the blockade that medicines and drugs were “countraband.” The “Anaconda” systematically prevented shipments of drugs and surgical instruments to the South, a “measure which did not shorten the conflict by a day, but cost the Southern troops untold agony,” as Allen Nevins observes in his essay “The Glorious and the Terrible” Saturday Review, September 2, 1961 . Adams had been among the lucky; he had been operated on under benefit of chloroform anesthetic. When he came to, “Of what happened about me during this ten or eleven days that I lay on this part of the Wilderness battlefield, I have but a vague rememberance. It seems like a horrid nightmare. The groans and complaints of the wounded suffere
Dr. Paul Steiner, writing in Military Medicine, May, 1956 , gives some interesting notes on head injuries, evidently at relatively low velocities. “Was it worth while having men with head wounds carried from the field?” was a topic of interest to surgeons in the spring of 1864 . Brigadier General Alexander S. Webb and Brigadier General James S. Wadsworth discussed the matter; both were to fall victim of head wounds, Wadsworth to die, Webb to remember and to write about it. Matthew Brady’s ubiquitous bright rifle musket adds incongruous note to grim lesson of War : the silent brutality of death which the living too soon forget. Bounding lazily like a ball, spent 12-pounder shell has disembowled Federal soldier.