Medical Recollections

Medical Recollections is the memoir of one of American medicine's most important figures, Dr. Jonathan Letterman, the father of battlefield medicine. Letterman served of the Army of the Potomac from July 1862 to January 1864. During that time he reinvented medical operations in the field and created a revolutionary system for evacuating and treating wounded soldiers quickly and effectively. The Letterman Plan would become Federal Law by the end of the Civil War and today remains the basis for much of battlefield, emergency, and disaster medicine around the world. Written immediately after the war, the memoirs detail Letterman's experiences as Medical Director and the process by which he came to revolutionize emergency medicine.