DANIEL GARRISON BRINTON was an important medical figure in the nineteenth century. Born in 1837 in Chester County, Pennsylvania—on a farm that had been in his family since 1684—he graduated from Yale in 1858 and Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1860 before traveling to Europe in 1861 to study at Paris and Heidelberg. Upon returning to the United States, he entered the Union Army in August 1862, becoming surgeon-in-chief of the First Division of the Eleventh Corps in the Army of the Potomac. He witnessed the fighting at Chancellorsville firsthand and worked in a field hospital in “a large brick mansion” near the Rappahannock River. He wrote, “I borrowed a case of instruments & went to work. Not many of the cases were severe, but they were abundant. Here we staid all day, & slept at night under a wagon, the forest burning all round us and the din...
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