Records, Becollections and Reminiscences.

DR. D. D. SAUNDERS.

Dudley D. Saunders, M.D., was born in Lawrence County, Ala., February 26, 1835. He graduated at LaGrange College, Alabama, read medicine with Dr. H. Mott, of Mobile, graduated in medicine at the Medical University of New York aud the Medical University of Pennsylvania the same year, 1856. Having attended his first course at the Medical University of Pennsylvania and his second at the Medical University of New York, and standing examination at each the same year. He spent a year in Bellevue Hospital as interne and then three years abroad in the European Hospitals. He has lived in Memphis, Tenn., since 1859, with the exception of four years in the Confederate Hospital service. He has been in all the epidemics which have visited Memphis since 1859, and was President of the Board of Health during the terrible epidemic of 1878. He was a Hospital Surgeon in charge of Hospital Posts during the war as well as Assistant Medical Director of Hospitals of the Army of Tennessee. He was also upon the Medical Examining Board of the Army of Tennessee. His commission which has been lost, bears an early date in 1861. His surrender was at Atlanta after Gen. Lee's and Johnson's surrender. He has filled the chairs of Anatomy and Surgery in the Memphis Medical College and now fills the chair of Clinical Medicine, Physical Diagnosis and Diseases of the Chest in the Memphis Hospital Medical College. He has been President of the Memphis Medical Society and Tennessee State Medical Society. He is now a member of these societies as well as the Tri-State Medical Society and the American Medical Association. At the last reunion he was elected President of the "Association of Medical Officers of the Army and Navy of the Confederacy."

ANNUAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION OF MED.
ICAL OFFICERS OF THE ARMY AND NAVY
OF THE CONFEDERACY,

The fourth annual meeting of the Association met in Memphis, Tennessee, on Wednesday, May 28, 1901, in the Odd Fellows building.

The meeting was called to order by Dr. G. B. Malone, Chairman of the local Medical Committee of the United Confederate Veterans, and addressed as follows:

Representing the City of Memphis, under her orders we have prepared for this Association this room. We have also prepared for you a luncheon at 2 P.M. each day in the banquet hall on the next floor below; and it is my pleasure now to turn this hall over to your Committeeman, Dr. R. W. Mitchell.

The meeting was then formally called to order by Dr. R. W. Mitchell, and opened with prayer by Rev. G. B. Overton, Chaplain of the Association.

The President of the Association, Dr. J. M. Keller, of Hot Springs, Ark., then addressed the meeting as follows:

"Before proceeding to the regular order of business, I wish for a moment to indulge in a few retrospections. Forty-five years ago I came, a young doctor, into this city, then a village of a few thousand people. There was but one railroad, I think, entering the town. The Mississippi River and that road, and the ox wagons and teams attended to the commerce of the then village of Memphis. Often at that time I have seen numbers of drays and wagons stuck fast in mud holes on Main Street. In that year and the year following I have seen the buggies of my friends, Drs. Mitchell and Saunders stuck fast in the mud, and had to be pulled out. To-day we are in a city of 141,000 people. [A voice: "To-day we have over 200,000.]

The City of Memphis has to-day, I think forty or fifty miles of street cars and eleven railroads running into it; vitrifled pavements and smooth concrete side walks fill the places of those mud holes. Often I have seen signs over places in the streets forty-five years ago, reading: "No bottom here," and occasionally a pole with a hat on it and a sign: "Man lost." What a change! All is extremely beautiful, but gentlemen, this is an extremely sad occasion to me. There is alive to-day but one single practitioner of medicine who was in Memphis when I first came here. I feel absolutely like a broken shaft, soon to go. My friends, Drs. Mitchell, Thornton and Erskine came afterward, but of those in Memphis at the time I reached here forty-five years ago there is but one single man left. The President then introduced Dr. Alexander Erkskine, of Memphis, who delivered the address of welcome, as follows:

ADDRESS OF WELCOME.

"Comrades, Doctors, Surgeons of the Lost Cause: Brothers reunited

after thirty-five years of separation,, an old comrade addresses you in tremulous tones and stretches out his aged arm to welcome you heartily and cordially to our hospitable city.

In the name of the Medical Committee of Arrangements, whose energies and liberality have made it possible for us to receive you, I welcome you.

On behalf of the Committee of Arrangements of the Association of Medical Officers of the Army and Navy of the Confederacy, I welcome

you.

The few surviving surgeons who reside here-eight in number-with one living hospital steward, and the straggling rear guard of those old surgeons who reside in West Tennessee and whose brotherhood is only nine in number, salute you and greet you as old and loved friends.

It gives us inexpressible pleasure to meet you once again. Forty years is a long period over which to glance in rapid reminiscence. In the vividness of its recollections it is very brief. It seems but yesterday. Its memories are indelible. The iron has burned too deeply into our souls for us ever to forget them. When we recall its events so rapid in their hurried march, but so stupendous in their results it seems like a horrible dream from which we would awake. In retrospect, they seem strange, passing strange; in utter nakedness, a cold reality.

When we

To you and to me what a contrast between then and now. entered upon the struggle of 1861, we were young and strong and brave. Now we are old and feeble and timid. Then our cheeks were ruddy and smooth and flushed with manly glow. Now, they are wrinkled and furrowed. Many storms have beaten fiercely upon them, and have bronzed their hue and deepened their lines. Then, our eyes were bright and burned and glowed with the lustre of hope. Patriotic fire flashed from every glance. Now they are dimmed with age. Soon those windows that we look out of will be darkened.

they are feeble and be

Now they are scant Then our arms were

Then our steps were sturdy and steady, now gin to totter. Then our locks were rich and full. and grey and our beards are white like the snow. manly and strong. Now, the keepers of the house tremble.

But, notwithstanding the fact that age has frosted your brows and enfeebled your steps, you bear upon your faces the impress of the habit of life-long, professional thought, and I see in your eyes that the same spirit sparkles which animated you in the dark days of 1864. This is indelibly impressed upon you, and it could not be disguised, so plain are its lines.

You stand out to-day the same type of humanity's slave as when your stars indicated your rank in that memorable war. The profession of medicine is in its intent and practice a humane one, and our branch of the service necessarily demanded this expression from us as its exponents.

No one can deny that in so large an army there were many men who were brutal and drunken and unworthy, but the true type of the Confederate surgeon was kind and gentle, firm and fearless. His nerves were of

steel, but his heart was as wax. His duties demanded the possession of many of those qualities which belonged to the common soldier. He was often exposed to the greatest dangers and needed to be brave. He learned to be patient under privations, endured every hardship with fortitude; braved every danger; discharged every duty with fidelity; was kind alike to friend and foe, cared for the sick and wounded with womanly tenderness, whether in hospital or in field, in the lonely bivouac or on the weary march; was courteous and sympathetic in expressions of gentleness; softened the declining hours of the dying and often pointed the passing soul to a higher destiny.

Poorly fed, scantily clad, often hungry, drenched with rain, at times tentless, sick and weary well nigh unto death, with prolonged watching, he endured to the end. When the flag he loved so well and followed so long was at last furled and trailed in the dust, then, though ruined in fortune and often in health, though pride was humbled and hopes were crushed, he turned with a brave but sad heart to his desolated home, full oft the picture of absolute ruin. Reduced to poverty, friends dead or far removed, it was enough to appall the stoutest heart. But brave men like these, inured to misfortune were not to be daunted. With patient toil they went steadily to work to repair their fortunes.

The calm dignity and proud poise with which the Confederate soldier accepted his defeat, and resumed his citizenship and loyalty to the powers that be, and retrieved his losses is an illustration of the moral sublimity which has elicited the admiration of the world.

Under the hardships of the war and before its close many of the sur geons succumbed and died, and are buried in long-forgotten graves, unrecorded and lost save in the enshrinement of bereaved and stricken hearts. But I cannot refrain from paying a tribute to the survivors-to those who have died since, as well as to those who live and some of whom mingle with us to-day. Their numbers are very small and they are rapidly diminishing. I include those who reside in the Mississippi Valley from New Orleans to Memphis. Most of them perished in the great epidemics which swept over us in 1873, 1878 and 1879. In 1873 in Memphis alone, 2,000 persons died; in 1878, 5,000; in 1879, 500. Many of the interior towns of Mississippi and Louisiana were desolated and some almost destroyed.

Ah, those were times which tried the courage and the manhood of the medical profession, and throughout it all, they bore themselves as bravely as they did during the bloody battles of the war.

ease.

In 1878 there were borne to our ears (from the far South) upon the hot autumnal air low and angry mutterings of an approaching stormblack with clouds, vivid with lurid flashes and laden with deadly disIt had already begun its destructive work in the cities below us. Its dark wings black as the angel of death swept forward with resistless force; within a few days Memphis and the entire valley was caught within its horrid grasp. Consternation overwhelmed all hearts, the alarm became a fearful panic-business languished and died-thousands fled.