Dr. Joseph M. Pound
Dripping Springs, Hays County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(1827-1914) In Mexican War at age 19. Got M.D. at Louisville, Ky. In 1853 settled 2 miles from here. Home was clinic-hospital for young and old, rich and poor of area. As Civil War surgeon, he took scarlet fever. Sent home, he got well, joined frontier regiment. (In this war, for each combat death, 2 died of disease.) Confederate doctors had many problems with drug supply, surgical tools, horse-drawn ambulances and hospitals. Instruments had to be bought in Europe (shipped through naval blockage) or captured from the foe. Drugs came in by blockade-runner or were brought from North by ladies who hid them on the person: in Pompadours, bustles, petticoats. Scarcities led to use of dogwood, willow and poplar bark tea as substitute for quinine. Mullein and other wild herbs were medical substitutes. Garden poppies were milked for opium. Sutures were made of horsehair softened by boiling or from silk cloth ravelings. Female nurses were used for first time in army hospitals. This was first was to use anesthetics. Amputations left severed limbs stacked like wood around the field hospitals. Ambulances seemed never at hand for casualties; many died awaiting aid. Till the atom bomb, the Civil War was history's bloodiest.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Dr. Joseph M. Pound served in the Mexican War as a teenager, earned his medical degree in Louisville, and in 1853 settled near Dripping Springs, where his home doubled as a clinic and hospital for rich and poor alike. As a Confederate surgeon he contracted scarlet fever, recovered, and returned to a frontier regiment. The marker vividly recounts the desperate improvisations of Civil War medicine—bark teas standing in for quinine, opium milked from garden poppies, sutures of horsehair and silk, and the first widespread use of anesthetics and female army nurses.
Why it matters
Pound's story opens a window onto Civil War medicine, a brutal, inventive practice waged amid shortages that killed twice as many soldiers by disease as by battle.
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Nearby & related markers
Home of Dr. Joseph M. Pound
Dripping Springs, TX
Dr. Joseph M. Pound and his wife Sarah raised the first log rooms of this Hill Country home in 1853, using hand-hewn timbers, square nails, and enslaved labor. The house served the frontier as church, hospital, and waystation — Methodist circuit riders preached here, and the sick came rich or poor. Pound had soldiered as a private in the Mexican War and would serve as a Confederate surgeon in the Civil War.
Driftwood Cemetery
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This cemetery began in 1884, when the Driftwood Methodist congregation built a sanctuary on land from David and Mattie Dorrah and set aside a burial ground just south of it. Graves from an older 1870s community cemetery were moved here, and among those at rest are the church's founding trustees and at least eight Civil War veterans. The Driftwood Cemetery Association still cares for it today.
Camp Ben McCulloch No. 946, United Confederate Veterans
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In the summer of 1896, Hays County Confederate veterans and their families gathered at Martin Spring on Onion Creek and organized a chapter of the United Confederate Veterans, naming it for General Ben McCulloch, who fell at the Battle of Pea Ridge in 1862. The group bought the reunion grounds in 1904, and the annual gathering has continued ever since, missing only one year during World War I. As the last veterans died, the site passed to their sons, grandsons, and descendants, who keep the reunions alive.
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