Dr. William Watt White
Cuero, DeWitt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(1829 - 1914) Surgeon of Waul's Legion, Confederate Army. Came to Texas about 1850. In 1856 got M.D. degree in Philadelphia. During Civil War, saved many lives, but took typhoid, which contributed to loss of his eyesight. After blindness, practiced rest of his life. Was local educational and civic leader, this county. 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 blockade) or captured from the foe. Drugs came in by blockade - runner or were brought from North by ladies who hid them on their 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 also medical substitutes. Garden poppies were milked for opium. Sutures were made of horsehair softened by boiling, or by raveling silk cloth. Female nurses were used for first time in army hospitals. This was first war 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. William Watt White earned his medical degree in Philadelphia in 1856 and served as a surgeon in Waul's Legion of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The marker uses his life to open a window onto the grim improvisation of Confederate battlefield medicine — quinine substitutes brewed from tree bark, sutures raveled from silk or boiled horsehair, drugs smuggled past the naval blockade — during a war whose casualties were staggering. White himself contracted typhoid that eventually cost him his eyesight, yet he continued to practice medicine and lead in civic life long after going blind.
Why it matters
It personalizes the desperate scarcities of Civil War medicine, when doctors met unprecedented carnage with makeshift tools and folk remedies, and honors a physician who kept serving even after the war had taken his sight.
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Related people
- · Dr. William Watt White
Related events
- · American Civil War
Themes & tags
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