A few years ago, our local Veterans Administration hospital changed its name, dropping “Hunter Holmes McGuire” from its title, in line with the federal government’s new policy about naming things after Confederate soldiers. I approve of the policy but question the McGuire decision. Dr. McGuire was not a combatant, and his service during the Civil War was only an aspect of his enormous contribution to medicine in Virginia and beyond.
In researching my new book The Night Doctor of Richmond, I read about Dr. McGuire, and decided to include him as a character in the story, since he worked with my protagonist Chris Baker for decades at the Medical College. In my novel, he leads hundreds of Southern medical students home from Philadelphia in the build-up to the war (true), hires Baker (I made that up) to come with him to his competing medical school, The College of Physicians and Surgeons, which he founded in 1883, and plays a key (and salutary) role in an episode torn from the era’s newspapers that led to a near riot (also true).
But there is, of course, more to his story. Yes, Dr. McGuire, born and raised in Winchester and the son of a physician there, served in the Confederate army, from its first days to final surrender. General Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson was his first commander, defending McGuire’s hometown and discovering the horrors of modern warfare together at the battles of First Manassas and Antietam (still the deadliest day of war in American history), then on to the skirmishes of the Valley Campaign, Fredericksburg and the friendly fire wounding of Jackson at Chancellorsville.
The two men became close friends. Jackson, a famous hypochondriac, trusted McGuire for treatment of his many phantom ailments, and they rode side-by-side on campaigns. When Jackson fell asleep in the saddle, McGuire would hold his coat tail to keep him seated. But their work was very different. To put it bluntly, Jackson provided the patients for McGuire’s medical corps. And as the brutal war ground on, and as McGuire was promoted from brigade surgeon to first surgeon of Jackson’s corps, he developed innovative surgeries, triage protocols and organizational methods. To provide a sense of scale to his efforts, in a lecture on anesthesia years later, he claimed to have used chloroform in 40,000 battlefield surgeries.
Early in the war, when several Union Army doctors were captured, McGuire insisted that they be freed as non-combatants and returned to their units. This policy was thereafter followed by both sides for the rest of the war, and came in handy when McGuire himself was captured and freed.
White Southerners of a certain (ahem) age can tell you all about Jackson’s wounding, how McGuire amputated his arm, and what Jackson told the doctor as he died (of pneumonia a few days later). Northerners hoot when they see the sign on Interstate 95 noting the burial place, not of Jackson’s body (which lies in his hometown of Lexington), but of that arm. McGuire continued on as surgeon of General Richard Ewell’s corps for the rest of the war, directing proto-MASH units at Gettysburg and during the Petersburg siege near war’s end. He was at Appomattox when Lee surrendered.
So yes Dr. McGuire served with distinction in the Confederate Army, though he never fired a shot. Was he a slave holder? As a young physician when the war began, he had a man-servant, almost certainly an enslaved person, so yes.
At war’s end, Dr. McGuire took a professorship at the Medical College in Richmond and launched a busy private practice that involved everything from birthing babies to amputations and abdominal surgeries. Unhappy with the lax teaching at the Medical College, he founded his own school of medicine down the street, which proved a great success (after his death the two schools merged and operate today as the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine), and he founded St. Luke's Hospital (eventually purchased by Humana). A prolific writer and medical advocate, he rose to the Presidency of the American Medical Association.
But he didn’t just write about medicine, and this is where some of our problem deepens. We’re all familiar with the recent efforts to white-wash American history, pretending that slavery was somehow not all that. This effort began with Hunter McGuire, who became outraged at post-war schoolroom history books produced in the North that dared to claim that the war was over slavery and that the Confederates were traitors to the Union. Until the end of his life, McGuire campaigned vigorously for the revisionist notions we now call the “Lost Cause,” and he made sure that students in Virginia classrooms (I was one of them) learned that slavery wasn’t all that bad, and that the Civil War was fought over something called “states’ rights”. Next time you see a Confederate flag flying in a neighbor’s yard, you can thank Dr. McGuire for that.
So yes, I can see why the VA Hospital changed its name, even though Virginia’s own Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire is one of the most influential and heroic doctors in American history. There is, however, a sort of consolation prize. In 1904, soon after his death, a statue of a seated Dr. McGuire was erected on the Capitol grounds here in Richmond, and there he sits to this day, though the city’s monuments to his generals are all gone. Well, almost. A statue of his friend Stonewall Jackson stands right next to his in the shade of the same tall oak.
Note: Surprisingly there is no authoritative biography of Dr. McGuire. A brief and unevenly edited book, Hunter Holmes McGuire: Civil War Surgeon by John W. Schildt (1986, 2002 reprint) is still in print.
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