Authors: Jane Langton

The Deserter (34 page)

BOOK: The Deserter

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Another source book provided three of the case studies composed by my fictional Patent Office surgeon. Actually they are authentic studies reported in 1870 by Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes. They appear in
One Vast Hospital: The Civil War Hospital Sites in Frederick, Maryland, after Antietam
, by Terry Reimer. (The complete list of wounded patients fills nearly two hundred pages of small print, fifty names to a page.)

Many knowledgeable people informed and corrected this rash venture into history. Professor David Donald recommended the most essential reading. Christopher Morss and Paul Travers loaned dozens of books. Isabelle Plaster loaned old family volumes, Malcolm Ferguson found a rare memoir and reference librarian Jeanne Bracken was tireless in finding faraway titles.

In Gettysburg Jared Peatman twice conducted my son Andy and me around the several battlefields and on both occasions Professor Jean Potuchek offered the key to her house. By E-mail from Washington Michael Musick explained in detail how Homer Kelly would make his way into the military records of the National Archives, and Patent Office historian Kenneth Dobyns (whose name should appear in letters of gold) began by answering a few questions and went on to provide massive amounts of information, answering endless questions.
Could the guns of Gettysburg be heard in Philadelphia? Where was the B&O station in Washington
? His knowledgeable friend Louis Allahut kindly read the manuscript. A great many more questions were answered by Laurence Golding, a veteran reenactor who gallops across one field of battle after another.

Here at home Tom Blanding supplied helpful history about Concord during the Civil War, Diane and Herbert Haessler explained nineteenth-century medical practices and astronomer Alan Hirshfeld reported on the state of weather and moonlight in Gettysburg during the first week of July in 1863. Norman Levey kept the electronic connections working, Betty Levin and Ellen Raja knew about farming and Katherine Hall Page loaned an album of haunting nineteenth-century faces.

Much of this story is concerned with real and fictional Harvard soldiers. But I agree wholeheartedly with Homer Kelly's disgruntled opinion that the unfulfilled life of an Illinois farmboy was as promising as those of the men whose names are inscribed on the tablets in Harvard's Memorial Hall.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Photographs courtesy of: Harvard University Archives, Historic Northampton, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Adams County Historical Society, Wisconsin State Historical Society, the Patent Office Historical Collections of Judy, Diane and Jim Davis, the Burns Archive, the National Archives and Records Administration, Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library, the Boston Athenaeum, the Rockaway Borough Library in Rockaway, New Jersey, and the Meserve Collection in the National Portrait Gallery.

This edition published in 2012 by
MysteriousPress.com
/Open Road Integrated Media

180 Varick Street

New York, NY 10014

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