Background
John Hill Brinton was born on May 21, 1832 in Philadelphia, the son of George and Margaret (Smith) Brinton.
( John Hill Brinton (1832–1907) met, observed, and commen...)
John Hill Brinton (1832–1907) met, observed, and commented on practically the entire hierarchy of the Union army; serving as medical director for Ulysses S. Grant, he came into contact with Philip H. Sheridan, John C. Frémont, Henry W. Halleck, William A. Hammond, D. C. Buell, John A. Rawlins, James Birdseye McPherson, C. F. Smith, John A. McClernand, William S. Rosecrans, and his first cousin George Brinton McClellan. John Y. Simon points out in his foreword that Brinton was one of the first to write about a relatively obscure Grant early in the war: "Brinton found a quiet and unassuming man smoking a pipe―he could not yet afford cigars― and soon recognized a commander with mysterious strength of intellect and character." Positioned perfectly to observe the luminaries of the military, Brinton also occupied a unique perspective from which to comment on the wretched state of health and medicine in the Union army and on the questionable quality of medical training he found among surgeons. With both A.B. and A.M. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and postgraduate training in Paris and Vienna at a time when most medical schools required only a grammar school education, Brinton was exceptional among Civil War doctors. He found, as John S. Haller, Jr., notes in his preface, "the quality of candidates for surgeon’s appointments was meager at best." As president of the Medical Examining Board, Brinton had to lower his standards at the insistence of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Haller points out that one "self-educated candidate for an appointment as brigade surgeon explained to the board that he could do ‘almost anything, from scalping an Indian, up and down.’" Brinton assigned this singular candidate to duty in Kansas "where Brinton hoped he would do the least amount of damage." Throughout the war, the dearth of qualified surgeons created problems. Brinton’s memoirs reveal a remarkable Civil War surgeon, a witness to conditions in Cairo, the Battle of Belmont, and the Siege of Fort Donelson who encountered almost every Union military leader of note. Brinton wrote his memoirs for the edification of his family, not for public consumption. Yet he was, as Haller notes, a "keen observer of character." And with the exception of Brinton’s acceptance of late nineteenth-century gossip favorable to his cousin General McClellan, Simon finds the memoirs "remarkable for accuracy and frankness." His portrait of Grant is vivid, and his comments on the state of medicine during the war help explain, in Haller’s terms, why the "Civil War was such a medical and human tragedy."
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John Hill Brinton was born on May 21, 1832 in Philadelphia, the son of George and Margaret (Smith) Brinton.
Brinton was graduated with the degree of B. A. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1850, and received his degree of M. D. two years later at the Jefferson Medical College. After a year's post-graduate study in Paris and Vienna, in company with the late Prof. J. M. DaCosta, he returned to Philadelphia, entered upon general practise, and was made demonstrator in operative surgery in the Jefferson Medical College.
A year later Brinton was advanced to the position of lecturer on operative surgery which he held until the outbreak of the Civil War. In his Personal Memoirs he tells us that he was commissioned brigade surgeon on August 3, 1861, his name being fourth on the list of volunteer surgeons.
He served with Grant in the Tennessee and Cumberland River campaign in 1862, and was then ordered for duty in the office of the Surgeon-General in Washington. While there he helped to prepare The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1870 - 88), writing the article on Gunshot Wounds, and was designated to establish an Army Medical Museum.
Later he was relieved from duty in Washington and ordered to actice service under General Rosecrans, serving as medical director in the field in the Missouri campaign.
He was later made superintendent of the hospitals in Nashville, Tennessee, and medical director of the Army of the Cumberland. He resigned from the army on February 11, 1865, returned to Philadelphia, and was again made lecturer on operative surgery at the Jefferson Medical College.
Subsequently in 1882 he succeeded Dr. Samuel D. Gross as professor of the practise of surgery and clinical surgery at the same college and continued in this position until May 1906 when he was made an emeritus professor. He was visiting surgeon at St. Joseph Hospital from 1895 until his death, and filled the same position at the Philadelphia Hospital, 1867-82 and at the Jefferson Medical College Hospital from 1877 on.
He wrote little, but his writings make us wish he had accomplished more with his pen. His Personal Memoirs were written for his children. He also edited John E. Erichsen's Science and Art of Surgery (1854) and delivered the valedictory address to the graduating class of the Army Medical School in 1896. Some years previously, in 1869, he had delivered in Philadelphia the Mutter lectures on surgical pathology, with "Gun Shot Injuries" as his subject.
When the Civil War began, Brinton volunteered and was commissioned a Brigadier Surgeon, US Volunteers, with the rank of Major, in August, 1861. Under Ulysses S. Grant at Cairo, Illinois, he became the General's medical director. In 1862 he founded the Army Medical Museum and worked on what would become The Medical and Surgical History of the Rebellion. After the war he was appointed surgeon to the Jefferson Hospital in 1869 where he became Professor of Surgery.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
( John Hill Brinton (1832–1907) met, observed, and commen...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Quotes from others about the person
"He was a broadly educated, cultivated, courteous, kindly gentleman. "
On September 13, 1866, he married Sarah Ward, daughter of the Rev. Ferdinand DeWilton Ward of Geneseo, New York.
