Valiant Surgeons in Army Blue

“There was one class of officers who were entitled to all the praise they received and much more besides, and that class was the surgeons, who never flagged in their attentions to sick and wounded, whether soldier or officer, American, Mexican, or Apache captive, by night or by day,” wrote John Bourke, in On the Border with Crook. For the frontier soldier serving in the Southwest, a point often came when luck ran out and an arrow or a lead slug felled him, or a mosquito sting brought h