behind AotW

Dr. Melancthon Storrs (Yale Medicine ’53) was commissioned Surgeon of the 8th Connecticut Infantry in October 1861 and, as Brigade Surgeon, treated wounded soldiers on South Mountain on 14 September 1862 and at the 3rd Division, Ninth Corps field hospital near Sharpsburg during and after the battle at Antietam on the 17th. The postwar portrait of him at the top is from the Hartford Medical Society as published by Dr. Robert M. Bedard in Four Connecticut Physicians: Window to Civil War Medicine and Service in the journal Connecticut Medicine (February 2009) [pdf].

One of his patients, seen below, was Captain Frederick M Barber of the 16th Connecticut, mortally wounded by a gunshot at Antietam. Surgeon Storrs operated on his hip on 18 September but could not save him. Barber died from “surgical fever” on the 20th. His photograph is in the Scott Hann collection, published online by John Banks.