Due to the ongoing pandemic, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine will not be holding an in-person conference in 2020.

Instead, this year the Museum will be hosting a digital seminar on November 21, 2020. This will feature speakers, digital presentations, and conversations with Museum staff. While we will miss in-person conversations with attendees this year, we are excited that through the Museum’s digital tools we can still provide a special program with experts in the field and make a space for conversation about the important topic of Civil War medicine. The presentations will center around the theme of medical care at and after the Battle of Gettysburg.

Tickets are $50 for Museum Members, $75 for non-members, and $15 for students. Click below to get your tickets today.

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Speakers and topics for the 2020 Digital Seminar include:

10:30 AM – Dr. Rick Shroeder and Fran Feyock – Licensed Battlefield Guides, GNMP

Holding back the deep, deadly, darkness with the light of a surgeon’s lamp

Modern Surgical Teams routinely review their most complex cases and surgical related deaths to learn and improve surgical care. These Case Review Conferences are not open to the general public. The results of these conferences remain confidential and are protected by law. Join Licensed Battlefield Guides Dr. Rick Schroeder, a practicing Orthopedic Trauma Surgeon, and Fran Feyock, a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist, for a behind the scenes look at a how a modern Surgical Case Conference would review surgical cases from the American Civil War.

We will explore several prominent Civil War era personalities as our patients. Based on our review primary medical source documentation, we will focus on Civil War Era Surgical and Anesthesia care. Attendees will be invited to participate in the Conference as members of the “National Civil War Medical Museum Surgical Review Committee.” Rick and Fran will provide a “modern perspective” look back into how these patients died and the care they would have received today.

12:30 PM – Ron Kirkwood – Author

“Too Much for Human Endurance”: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg

On the afternoon of July 1, 1863, on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, medical officers of the XI Corps of the Army of the Potomac rode up George and Elizabeth Spangler’s lane and announced they were taking possession of the Spanglers’ farm for use as a hospital. So for the next five weeks and two days, the Spanglers and their four children lived amid a nightmare of cries, smells, blood, agony and death. Kirkwood will discuss the suffering and heroism of the doctors, nurses, wounded and dying at this hospital and reveal new information about a second hospital on the Spanglers’ farm that has long been ignored by history that hosted the wounded men of the famous Wheatfield fight.

Also, Kirkwood’s presentation will include newly found information about Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis Armistead’s time as a patient at Spangler. In addition, he reveals important information about the thousands of artillery and infantry reserves that staged for battle directly next to the hospitals on the Spanglers’ land, making Spangler in his opinion the most important farm in the Battle of Gettysburg because of its critical role in the Union victory.

2:00 PM – Codie Eash – Seminary Ridge Museum

“Pick up your guts & help finish this thing”: Macabre Recollections of Gettysburg’s Casualties

Many Civil War soldiers’ graphic letters, diary entries, and memoir excerpts described the grisly reality of dismembered bodies, particularly following costly battles like Gettysburg. The details featured in such reminiscences are sometimes shocking, but are necessary for a comprehensive understanding of what America’s bloodiest armed encounter meant to veterans who witnessed the butchery of July 1863. Writers decided such scenes were important enough to record for posterity, and thus, subsequent generations must examine the uncomfortable realities that these men not only witnessed, but reported for all time.