Peter Charles Remondino Autobiography (1846-1926)
Transcript of an original document on file at the San Diego Historical Society, Dr. P.C. Remondino Papers, MS-4.
In the first three weeks of May of 1864, there occurred the series of terrific and costly chain of continuous battles, beginning on the 5th of May in the wilderness which lasted until the 18th, a period of thirteen days of crushing slaughter, finally ending in the neighborhood of Spottsylvania Court House, with a total of 9,774 killed and 41,150 wounded. This caused an urgent call from the medical departments throughout the eastern and middle states for volunteers among the civilian medical population to come to the aid of the military medical corps in caring for that great number of wounded, as the regularly organized medical staff was helplessly overwhelmed with such a mass of wounded on its hands.
Young Remondino was among he first to offer his services to the government and, on the suggestion and a personal recommendation of Prof. Ellerslie Wallace of the Jefferson faculty, immediately reported for duty to the U. S. Army Medical Director at Philadelphia and was sent on the same day to report to Surgeon Vanderkieft, in charge of the U. S. Gen. Hospital, Div. No. 1, at Annapolis Md. which occupied the Naval Academy grounds and buildings, the naval personnel having been sent to Newport R. I. He was, on arriving at that hospital, appointed to assist the surgeon in charge of Section 5, as a volunteer unsalaried Acting Medical Cadet.
This Section had many of the wounded from the many early May battle fields and wounds of every description. The doctor remembers particularly one man in whom a confederate bullet had plowed a deep furrow, four inches long through scalp and skull who lived and, by contrast, one whose right temple had been grazed by a bullet who died from the result of the wound fourteen days after receiving it, after having been about the ward until forty-eight hours before his death.
Dr. Vanderkieft was about the most perfect hospital administrator the doctor had the pleasure of serving under. In many of the military hospitals he had been in, the dressers, soldiers appointed to act as such, were, as a rule, given too much latitude in their manner of tending and dressing wounds, especially was this the ease wherein many of them were possessed of a perfect mania for the employment of sticks of lunar caustic, blue stone and alum, with which they were continually touching and irritating the surfaces or the edges of the wound at each dressing. Nothing of this kind was here permitted, nor wore sponges allowed to be used. Wounds were irrigated when required with sterilized water, and as little tampered with as possible. Complicated wounds had to be dressed by either the surgeon or by his cadet assistant.
"I have some very vivid recollections," observed the Doctor, "of a young man, a perfect young giant, who in the Wilderness had been shot thru the wrist joint in a straight line from the palmar surface and out at the back of the wrist. The wound had become fly-blown on the long and tedious journey to the hospital and on his arrival was full of maggots. We were ordered not to use any maggot destroying washes, but one of us was to hold up the forearm and hand horizontally while the other picked them out of the wound with a pair of dressing forceps as these came to the surface, either in the back or front of the wound. The applied dressings in this hospital were made of finely picked oakum."
In Minnesota, the doctor had often been present where the young Sioux squaws dressed either a gunshot or knife wound among their own people by making a tent or pencil out of chewed-up strips of slippery-elm bark so as to fit and fill the wound to its bottom, which produced far better results than was obtained with oakum, while the latter always, gave better results than the charpie with which wounds were dressed in many of the other hospitals.
"I well remember," said Dr. Remondino, "when reading the symposium written by different surgeons upon the management of the President's wound published in the Popular Science Monthly, some time after the death of President Garfield, the suggestion then came to my mind that, had the illustrious patient been attended by a couple of Sioux squaws with their little wooden chopping bowl in which they placed their chewed-up elm-bark preparatory to moulding it into pencils with which to carefully fill the wound, without any of the mischievous exploratory efforts to locate the bullet, that attended those multitudinous consultations without which he would have had far better chances for living. Poor President Garfield's fate always reminded me of the death of Charles II, of England, who had something over a dozen consulting physicians -- some chroniclers say he had twenty -- whose different prescriptions were, in the order of precedence to which the prescriber was entitled, used in their regular but rapid succession so that it was a question, in the end, as to whose particular prescription the taking off of his majesty could be rightfully ascribed.
"I have always admired," continued the doctor, "the good sense of Napoleon, when the somewhat flurried physician in attendance on the Empress Marie-Louisa, was worrying as to whether or not he should resort to an instrumental delivery, was told by the Emperor to forget, that he was attending an empress and to do whatever his good professional sense would suggest, were he in attendance on a common market woman of the faubourgs, and act accordingly."
As soon as the pressing need for extra assistance was over in the Annapolis hospital, Dr. Remondino, being desirous of seeing more immediately active service, had himself transferred to the hospitals in the rear of our lines at Petersburg Va. , where he was detailed temporarily to the Cavalry Corps Hospital, a large collection of several hundreds of six-bed tents laid out in regular street order, located on a high level plateau at the mouth of the Appomatox river where it empties into the James with City Point on its eastern side. There he remained on duty until the time arrived for his return to Philadelphia to enter his class at college.
In this hospital, owing to its being in the immediate rear and not far from the center of the long fighting line and its greater accessibility, were brought many of the lightly wounded who could in a few days be returned to their ranks as well as the more grievously wounded for whom the frequent changes incident to the long transportation to the other hospitals would have been dangerous as well as the many cases of typhoid fever for whom also long transportation elsewhere was not advisable. These fever cases, which were generated in those long trenches during that summer, were a mixture of paratyphoid and malarial fever partly endemic to the region, partly aggravated by exposure and privation. As fast as these men could be discharged and sent back to their regiments, or some of the more grievously wounded had so far convalesced as to permit their removal to the extensive hospital at Hampton or to some of the other hospitals to the north, their removal was immediately effected so as to make room for the continued stream of other wounded and sick coming from the trenches and battle fields.
The season had been exceedingly hot and dry with a wondrously continuous high barometer which made the life of the soldiers in the trenches anything else but a picnic. Civilians can never realize what it meant to be in the Petersburg trenches, from the time of its investment to its ending with the result of the battle of Hatchers Run, a victory, which as hoped was immediately followed by the evacuation of Petersburg.
The doctor happened to be at City Point, where Gen. Grant had his headquarters, when the 6th Corps came thru from the extreme left, to board a large fleet of steamers which had been hurriedly sent down from every available source to immediately carry the whole corps to Washington, which was then being threatened by what was supposed to be a large Confederate force which had already laid siege and attacked Fort Stevens, one of the main Washington defenses. The Corps had come to City Point by marching along the main road leaving behind a trailing cloud of light dust, that rising some two hundred feet in the air, and in many places carried even higher in that dry air, marked the line of march as far as the eye could reach. The Corps had divested itself of everything possibe, not even carrying their blankets. The rubber cloth poncho, being worn as a bandoleer on the march, was all that served the soldiers as bed and. shelter during the night.
In common with all the rest of the soldiers in the Petersburg trenches, these 6th Corps men had not seen or tasted any fresh or dried vegetables since the beginning of Grant's campaign on the Weldon railroad and at Petersburg. At some distance from the James river the Sanitary and Christian Commissions had distributed for their refreshments some hundreds of large forty gallon barrels of pickled sauerkraut and of pickled onions on both sides of the road over which the troops were coming, the barrel heads removed, so that as the soldiers marched along they would take a handful of kraut or of onions and munch them as they want along. Arriving at the river, many enjoyed the first opportunity they had had for several months to indulge in a real wash. The poor fellows wore tanned and brown as so many Indians and none had any superfluous coats of fat.
It is needless to say that by the time that the 6th Corps reached the outskirts of Washington, that the Confederacy practically had vanished, as far as any daagerous army was concerned. This order of tactics was one of the favorite moves of threatening Washington to alarm Congress, which was then a very easy thing to do which was always sure to cause the recall of a large and dependable army to insure its security.
From the cot at the camp hospital at the mouth of the Appomatax the doctor could on a still night clearly hear the shouts and firing, as parties on either side attempted raids on each others lines or entrenchments. Men shot in the picket half-moon single redoubts could not then be rescued except on very dark nights without danger to the rescuing parties. These picket outposts between the lines were anything but places of joy.
In the Union trenches at Petersburg, there was a Wisconsin regiment, the 36th Vol. Inf., in which there was a whole company of Indians from northern Wisconsin. Many of these poor fellows were attacked by the fever and not one of the attacked escaped alive, the Indians not being able to stand such fevers as well as the white soldiers, an under an attack they failed very rapidly and died.
On his return to Philadelphia he again took his old place in the northern dispensary and, in Dr. Richardson's Quizz Class, as well as his favorite seat on the hard benches in the college lecture rooms. At the time of his graduation in the first weeks of March in 1865, the siege of Petersburg was still in progress and, there being at the time a demand for Acting Assistant surgeons, the doctor and a number of his fellow graduates had no difficulty in receiving appointments when recommended to some of these positions, from the U. S. Army Medical Directory at Philadelphia. He and four others of his class-mates being sent to the Hampton General hospital near Fortress Monroe, Va. The doctor, however, did not remain there long as he was soon after appointed surgeon to the military prison and Camp of Distribution of Camp Hamilton Va., situated on the peninsula between the large Hampton Seminary Building and the mouth of Hampton creek with orders to report to Capt. John L. Blake in command of the prison and of Battery F of the 3rd Penn. Heavy Artillery, which constituted the garrison of the camp and prison.
It was while surgeon of this prison that the doctor found his first experience in studying drug addicts. This occurred thru the fact that in this prison were confined all of the sailors of the crews and personnel of the blocade runners captured by the blocading squadrons from the north Atlantic and Gulf fleets, many of whom were helpless and veteran opium fiends.
It was while the doctor was in charge of that prison that an episode occurred, which, starting on its long voyage in the prison on Hampton Roads, was not finished until more than forty years later at Birmingham Alabama. The doctor has always been a collector of curios especially anything in the military line of relics. One morning he was called to the prison to see a drummer boy belonging to the 60th Georgia Infantry, who turned out to have an attack of double pneumonia and a congested liver. He was sent to the hospital where in time he made a perfect recovery. A few days later the doctor was called to see another boy, also a Confederate prisoner, who was troubled with some lung complaint. On going over to see him, it naturally became necessary to examine his chest to which he strenuously objected. The doctor, not seeing any valid reason for his objection, insisted on his removing the upper part of his shirt which he finally did, after asking the doctor to close the room door, altho with considerable hesitation and displeasure. "The cause of all this reluctance," said the doctor as he related the occurrence "became evident when wound about him next to his skin there appeared a beautiful crimson silken officer's sash with long silken tassels. It was, he explained, the sash of Colonel Troy of his regiment (which somehow I understood to be, or recollected, as being, the 60th Georgia, probably from having in mind the Georgia drummer boy) who had been killed at the battle of Hatchers Run. He had had just time enough to remove the sash from the body and secrete it as above described, when in the onrush of Sheridian's cavalry he was captured and sent with other prisoners to the rear, from where he was sent to the prison of which I was surgeon. He had traken it for the purpose of returning it, when returning home, to the Colonel's widow. He had been his commander's orderly and was very much attached to him.
"The camp and prison sutler opened in both the prison yard and in the camp, so that realizing that sooner or later the sash would be stolen from him by some of the other prisoners, who would barter it for some tobacco or other luxury, I offered him one dollar for it which, on my urgent solicitation, he finally but very regretfully permitted himself to part with it, evidently feeling that he was doing a very dishonorable and disloyal thing to the Colonel in doing so. I told him I would return it to him if he were exchanged and sent home from our prison, so I became possessed of the sash permanently as he was sent with many others to Newport News where a new stockade for prisoners of war had been constructed.
"On leaving the army for my home in Minnesota, the sash and a varied assortment of war relics which I had collected, among which wore many things from the battle fields about Petersburg, gathered by myself after the surrender of General Lee, went with me.
"Somehow of all my war relics", said the doctor, continuing the narrative, "the only one that accompanied me to California in 1873 was that sash. At the time that Pres, Cleveland proposed sending back to each of the old Confederate states their regimental and other colors that had been captured and sent to Washington, that sash reminded me of that Georgia family whose mind and wandering memories must often have pictured an unknown and forgotten grave into which was placed the body of the Colonel the day after the battle in-which that boy was captured and wondered what had become of them. The thought then occurred to me that if any member of the family were still living they should have the sash. Once started, this thought kept harassing me with the added suggestion that the thought ought to be literally carried out.
"With that idea, in view, I wrote to the Adjutant General of the State of Georgia asking him whether he could furnish me with any information as to the whereabouts of any member of the family of Col. Troy of the 60th Georgia Infantry of the Civil War period. To my great surprise and disappointment I received an answer to the effect that, after a careful search these old archives, no such name or officer had been found as having been in, command of any Georgia regiment. However, how mythical the Colonel may have been, there was the very material sash speaking for itself and I well remember the kiss that that poor boy prisoner gave that sash as he painfully parted with it, which affected me to the point that but for the assured fact that he would be robbed of it and that it would be safer in my hand, than with him, I would have returned it to him. As it was I had promised him that if ever I could find the whereabouts of the family I would send it to them.
"The misunderstandings and conflicting opinions aroused in Washington by the President's highly moral and logical suggestion, awakened in me an unslumbering desire to have that family possess that sash that ever afterwards I never relaxed my search for them. The boy's soul-earnest desire to return it to the family was so pronounced and real that I felt that there was no deception connected with it. There must, I felt, be some mistake somewhere, either in my mind or in the name of the Colonel, but I never could rid myself of the remembrance of 60th Georgia in connection with the dead Colonel, buried somewhere at Hatchers Run, and that sash.
"As observed the idea of returning it never slumbered. So it happened that one day while making a professional call on Mr. and Mrs. Thomas T. Hillman of Birmingham Ala., who were wont to pass their winters in San Diego where they owned a palatial home, I was introduced to a brother of Mrs. Hillman, who with his wife had arrived the evening before on a visit to the Hillman's. In introducing me to her brother Mrs. Hillman suggested that, as I had been the surgeon of a military prison in Virginia during the Civil War, I might have had her brother in my care as he had been a Confederate officer and had been captured.
This introduction led to a conversation on that war in the course of which I related the story of that sash belonging formerly to Col. Troy of the 60th Georgia, the whereabouts of whose family I had never, been able to learn, altho I had made many endeavors in many directions. Mr. Hillman had been listening to the conversation, and, after I had finished the story of that sash, suggested that my failure to locate the family was owing to the fact that I must have made a mistake in the regiment. There was, he said, a Col. Troy of the 60th Alabama Infantry who had been shot on the battle field at Hatchers Run and left for dead by the retreating troops, but when the Federals came up he was found still living, taken prisoner, placed in a hospital where he finally recovered and then interned in Elmira military prison until sent home at the final readjustment and that he only died two years ago -- this was in the middle of the first decade of the present century. The son of the colonel was a civil and mining engineer was then in Mr. Hillman's employment in Birmingham, where his mother Mrs. Col. Troy also resided. Here was the suddenly arrived at conclusion as to the whole mystery.
"One can easily imagine the surprise it must have occasioned in the Troy family on receiving a letter from Mr. Hillman informing them that he would be in Birmingham in about two weeks, bringing with him the Colonel's sash that his orderly had taken from his supposed dead body on the field of Hatchers Run, as a present to them from their family physician in San Diego, who had had it in his possession since the end of April in 1866, and had for many years been searching for the family to return it to them.
"The authenticity of its being, the actual sash represented by the boyish orderly, was further confirmed when it was placed in Mrs. Troy's hands who recognized it at once, as it had all been made by her own hands, as that worn by her husband when he left with his troop at the breaking out of the war for the Florida coast to garrison one of the old established forts."
In closing this interesting story, the doctor observed that his surmises that the chances of that sash ever being again seen by the Troy family would be far greater if it remained in his keeping than in the keeping of the boy, must at the time have been still under the age of twenty. The occurrence, as the doctor said, furnished, in its happy endings, one of the most pleasurable incidents in his long and adventurous life in both hemispheres. The doctor, as a recompence for his generous and thoughtful humane act, received a letter of thanks the Birmingham Post of the Daughters of the Confederacy which he greatly appreciated. The doctor, however, felt that he had simply carried out the wishes of the young orderly and performed a loyal duty to the Troy family. His only regret was that he made the blunder of mixing up the 60th Georgia for the 60th Alabama, but for this pardonable miscarriage of attention, the Colonel would have received his sash many years before his death. It is very doubtful if he ever, after his return home, expected to see that sash again after its disappearance from the field of Hatchers Run, or Five Forks, as it was known on our side.
The doctor remarked, as he finished the above relation, that he could easily write some volumes concerning his personal experience in that prison. Immediately after the battle above mentioned, a steamer fully loaded with Confederate wounded from that field, bound for some of the northern hospitals, stopped at the Fortress Monroe wharf where a large number of badly wounded Confederates were landed, preparations having been made for their care by the creation of a hospital consisting of a series of tents on the ground to the north of the Hampton Seminary which was placed in charge of Acting Assistant Surgeon, Andrew MacLaren, with whom Dr. Remondino associated on the most friendly terms.
The old Hampton Seminary to which Dr. MacLaren was attached had been transformed into an officer's hospital for the Union army. The morning after the arrival of all those Confederate wounded, he sent a note to the doctor by his orderly asking him to come over to his section after his duties of the morning at the prison were performed as he had more than his hands full. On going over, Dr. Remondino found the doctor busily engaged in examining each case and in deciding upon the operation that each required. It appears that, during the voyage down the James river, the surgical staff had segregated and classified the wounded and this particular class sent out to Dr. MacLaren's section were all gunshot wounds of the legs and the examination in each case showed that the wounds were all accompanied with fractures more or less comminuted.
The question resolved itself into one of simply locating the line where the amputation whould be performed. A more desperate and utterly unpromising lot of cases could not be conceived nor congregated except after a fierce and murderous battle. It Was not so much in the character of the wound, these were serious enough, but the danger lay in the terribly wrecked and broken down constitutions of the wounded. Had the men of Hatchers Run been better fed and conditioned Federals, at least four-fifths would have recovered but those poor half dead Confedereate wounded, were similarly to the Confederacy, in their death throes when wounded.
They were on and all in a fearful state of scorbutism, greatly emaciated from want of proper nourishment, and with nothing in their veins and arteries but scorbutic blood, which could not be counted on under the circumstances to maintain life in these poor fellows to say nothing about its inability to provide the proper or normally healthy plasma for the repair of the wounds made by sword, bayonet, or bullet, or those that would be made by the operations.
And still as miracles at times happen in surgery it was a reasonable conclusion to believe that a clean operating wound would give these poor wounded men better chances than to leave them alone to their comminuted bony wounds and their torn and ragged fleshy wound filled with more or loss dead bony debris, so we determined on amputation for the whole as being the safest procedure. In fact it would have been criminally neglectful to have let them all die without giving them this one slim chance to live.
The two doctors labored at those operations all of the forenoon, operating carefully but rapidly and quickly dressing the stump, but it was all in vain. Not one of those men had even a drop in their arteries of what could be called normal red blood and by the third day not a survivor remained.
Many of the Confederates that fell into our hands were so broken down that it seemed impossible to believe that such skeletons actually stood up in their ranks or were able to match in battle array and handle their muskets. Their rations for many past weeks had simply consisted of a small ration for the whole day consisting of a piece of cornbread not much larger than the hand which was made bulky and appeared nourishing by a process of grinding the corn with the husk into flour, all of which, while it might deceive the eye and stomach, could not deceive nature.
"I have a very distinct recollection," observed the doctor, "of an example up to what low state of vitality some of these men were reduced and still determinately fighting on their outposts, when a whole, platoon of Confederates seeing the uselessness of further resistance and that only starvation awaited them, had come over to our lines and surrendered. These men were not considered as prisoners of war but as refugees and were, on arriving at Camp Hamilton, given room in the refugee quarters. They had been brought down from City Point by, steamer and marched on foot from Fortress Monroe to the camp and on their arrival I found one so physically weak and so utterly demoralized that I placed him in the ambulance, much to his disgust, and sent him over to the Hampton Hospital for a rest and proper care. It was only a distance of some two miles to reach the hospital, but on the return of the ambulance to the Post the driver reported that the man had actually died on the way.
"My experience in that military prison covered more educational ground in various sociologic as well as in many medical directions, than could have been obtained and gone over during a whole natural life-time in times of peace. After the establishment of the new prison stockade at Newport News the command to which I belonged was ordered to proceed by steamer from Fortress Monroe to Yorktown from whence we were to march to Williamsburg Va. which we were to garrison. Here again I had an occasion to add some more specialties to my medical experience. On my arrival at Williamsburg, I found the state Lunatic Asylum in charge of acting assistant surgeon Peter Wager, a very accomplished middle-aged gentleman, with whom I formed a very intimate friendship which resulted to our mutual good, as it was not long after my arrival that the doctor was suddenly prostrated with very severe attack of typho-malarial fever that laid him out helpless, on account of which, at his request, I not only took charge of the doctor but also the management of the whole asylum. "On the morning that I took charge of the establishment, I made the acquaintance of the first moral reformer that it was my fortune to meet in my long life. Like all others of his class, he was a most perfect and incurable monomaniac on his one subject. He was, however, striking at the very root of human immorality and vice among Christian nations. I was walking in the grounds of the asylum when I met a portly, benevolent looking and very polite and well preserved gentleman with a ring of large keys swinging in his hand, who introduced himself to me as Mr. Butler. From the big ring of keys in his hand I naturally took him to be one of the keepers of the asylum, especially as he undertook to show me over the grounds explaining the different buildings and their history, until on approaching one of the main buildings where I had met him as I was about to enter the administration building, he asked me if by any possibility I was likely to be in Richmond at the sitting of the next state legislature. I began to think that there must be something wrong about Mr. Butler, so I told him that I would undoubtedly be there in persons upon which he drew out from his pocket a closely written memorandum written in a fine clear hand that he had prepared for presentation to the legislature, with the proper introductory speech.
"By that time I had reached the administrative office and gone in with my memorandum. I then learned that my friend, the moral reformer, had been an inmate of the hospital for some ten years before the war. He had gone insane on his favorite subject--the radical purification of Virginia, which in his insane imagination was made to appear as fowl as the cities of the plain in the Valley of Sodom which he had proposed to treat and radically cure thru such extreme methods that he could find no followers. He had but one cause for all the moral, physical, physiologic and psychic ills as well as for all the social, industrial end financial ills, that his fervid imagination painted as existing in Virginia, to which all imagined civilized humanity was alike subject.
"His conceived methods, however, were unlike those of the present general reformers who do not pay any practical attention toward the suppression of the causes of the evils which they are attempting to cure. To the fanatical reformer causes have no existance, or are immaterial. To him, preventive medicine has no existence and looks upon the practice as a being a concession to diseases, a cowardly compromise with forces of evil.
"Mr. Butler had evidently carefully studied his subject and traced all of its evil roots to their initial cause. He had taken under his consideration all the principal causes of these degenerations and their consequence. It was all those rootlets and causes that he proposed to eradicate and destroy. With Mr. Butler there was to be no compromising with sins, of any kind. He would trail the serpent to its lair and slay it.
"Hence his suggestion to the Virginia Legislature that all males in the Commonwealth, regardless of social standing or family connection, when arriving at puberty, should be given every morning an active dose of purified Epsom salts. If this did not tend to produce the desired effects, the dose of salts was to be increased. If these failed -- as they are very liable to fail thru possessing too animalistic, uncivilizable and rebellious natures -- then the morally and unfailing persuasive but more severe methods of the Greek monk Origen were advised.
"The memorandum which he desired to have presented to the legislature was full of details as to the appointment of overseers and of the law enforcement officers. As in the enforcement of the Volstead Act, the churches, ministers, and all the good people were to be asked by the Department of Notice of Virginia to form into law enforcement bodies of all necessary spies, informers, private investigators and other whatnots, to see that the new law would be properly enforced.
Mr. Butler was apparently perfectly sane on all other subjects but he was so taken up with his specific mania that it tinged all his thoughts and his mental activities in all other directions. Besides, his mania was by no means a "pot-boiler." It would not keep him from starving to death, nor furnish him with shelter or raiment, nor from continually annoying all his fellow citizens with his favorite subject so for his own protection and bodily comfort he was finally placed in the asylum where, having no home or shelter of his own, be had a free bed and his daily rations regularly given to him.
"The same asylum had another monomaniac, a kindly old gentleman, very industrious and good natured who, in his prime, had gone insane on the subject of perfecting a machine that would demonstrate the possibility of perpetual motion. The management had given him a large spare room whither he brought all his instruments and tools whereby to perfect his engine upon which he had been working for over twenty-five years. He never seemed discouraged, but on the contrary he was always cheerfully hopeful of succeeding. He was wont to assure me almost daily that,in a day or two more, a slight alteration made in his machine -- which was as large as a small thrashing machine which it very much resembled -- would undoubtedly start on its perpetual movements. This poor fellow also would have starved to death if left to work out his own salvation."
Dr. Remondino had no idea that the army of the Potomac, or as it was afterwards known, the Army of the James, had such a number of insane, as this asylum contained a great number of them most of them coming from along the intrenchments before Petersburg, the Weldon Railroad, and in the surroundings of Richmond.
During his stay in Williamsburg, the doctor occupied a room in the Middleton Mansion on Palace Green. This mansion was located next to the church which had been built with bricks brought from England. The same mansion had been used by General Washington as a headquarters during the Revolution and also had been used as the army headquarters since the capture of Williamsburg.
One day he received a notification from the medical director's office at Fortress Monroe informing him that the medical director had notified the chief officer in charge of the Freedman's Bureau of the district, then located at Ft. Magruder on the road between Williamsburg and Yorktown, to call upon the doctor for any medical or surgical purposes required by any of the freedmen under his charge which he was to honor upon being called. This was no light task as the jurisdiction of this officer extended from the York to the James river and nearly from New Kent Court House on the Richmond road, down to the town of Hampton.
One afternoon there came an urgent cell for his services from the officer at Ft. Magruder, to repair to a certain point, which he named on the York river, where a fierce and bloody battle had been fought between a small fleet of oyster pirates composed of freedmen and the owners of the oyster beds planted in that neighborhood, also freedmen. The oyster pirates had been beaten off and had retreated badly punished further up the river from whence they came and, very naturally, not being anxious to be identified and be sent to prison for their actions, did not send for anyone to attend to their wounded, so that he only had the injured from the victorious owners of the oyster beds to attend.
In starting from Williamsburg, he was accompanied by his personal orderly and his hospital steward Chayles Herschel, a man of experience who formerly has been a hospital steward in the Prussian army and was a most intelligent assistant. On arriving at the place where the wounded were distributed in their different cabins it being then dark, the only lights that they had to work by were lighted pine knots. The battle had been fought on both sides with long ashen oars peculiar to that region, the sharp edge of which cut like a sword, so that most of the wounds were about their heads and shoulders while some few had broken ribs where the oar had been used like a lance. Those very black freedmen had wonderfully thick skulls, so that although many were nearly scalped there was not a fractured skull in the whole lot. It was past midnight before they were thru with the scalp repairing and dressing, although they worked rapidly and then started for home.
Although this part of Virginia is not swampy, it is nevertheless the home of a bloodthirsty giant mosquito. The road from those oyster beds at the head of the York river back to Williamsburg went thru alternate strips of clearings and belts of timber, the latter being alive with mosquitos which unceremoniously and impartially lit on both men and horses, especially after dark, to feast upon what providence had thrown in their way. Dr. Remondino alone, suffered from this night travel, as on the next day he was taken with a terrific congestive chill followed by a fever all of which struck him like a tornado.
Dr. Wager who was immediately sent for, advised taking him to the asylum where he would place a room at his disposal where he would have the advantage of trained nursing. It was well that this was done as from the chill he developed a congested spleen and liver and partly congested lung which kept him in bed for over three weeks, from which time, Dr. Wager had kindly attended to him like a brother, while he also undertook the care of the troops in Dr. Remondino's charge. It was thru the seemingly unrecoverable results of this attack that the doctor eventually came to San Diego in an attempt to recover his health, leaving Minnesota for California in the latter months of 1873.
Similarly to the ravages made upon the heart such as that organ suffered when afflicted by Hartshorne's cardiac asthenia, as experienced by many of the infantry soldiers in the old Army of the Potomac when they were wont to trudge along for weeks at a time in the sticky Virginia mud -- a physically wrecked condition which in many soldiers adhered to them for the balance of their lives -- was similarly the fate of many soldiers who had been broken down thru a severe attack of malarial fever thru mosquito malarial infection.
In many of the latter, the blood, already demoralized thru excessive fatigue and privations, became so affected as to develop a scorbutic state in which the casual scratch of a pin or a bruise, to say nothing of the far more serious effects of a gunshot wound, would often end in gangrene and its added toxemia, in many cases presaging a fatal ending. This was particularly the case when smallpox became more or less epidemic in the army and the troops had to be vaccinated against its spread, during which many of the vaccinations or resulting sores became gangrenous, placing the vaccinated soldier at times in very serious danger even for his life.
The doctor, considering that he always had enjoyed perfect health from his earliest childhood, had always been well nourished, and had not been worn out by any long vigils, privations or marchings, nor had hard study ever effected him unfavorably, totally misinterpreted the future potential enduring effects of the Virginia typho-malarial fever from which he had so grievously suffered. After his apparent recovery, he found he was liable to sudden chillings after any exposures to the bright and warm sunshine, or to a still more severe chilling if sitting in the cool shade.
He, nevertheless, hoped and believed that, on returning to the north he would fully recover his former robust health. As the term of service of the battery to which he was attached was about to expire, and realizing that his recovery was very doubtful if remaining in Virginia, he, therefore, determined to leave the service and, after accompanying the regiment to Pennsylvania, to immediately leave for his Minnesota home.
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