xx Introduction 



tained at Centenary College, Jackson, and his M. D. 

 was taken at the New Orleans School of Medicine 

 in 1861. In November of 1862 he received an ap- 

 pointment as assistant surgeon under General Bragg 

 in the provisional army, being assigned to duty in 

 the artillery corps of Tennessee. Having served a 

 short time in that capacity, he was invited to appear 

 before the Army Medical Examining Board at Macon, 

 Mississippi. This examination resulted in his being 

 made a surgeon at the early age of twenty-one. La- 

 ter he was made Chief Surgeon of the Army of 

 Western Tennessee, serving honourably until the 

 close of the war. He then returned to the parish of 

 Point Coupee, to take charge of his mother's large 

 plantation. 



In 1867, however, the Doctor moved to Baton 

 Rouge, where he built up a great practice. He told 

 me that in the early days he often rode as much as 

 sixty miles in a day, using relays of horses, and was 

 sometimes so tired that he would sleep on his horse, 

 which would stop when it came to a house and so 

 wake him. He was for a long time often the only 

 available physician for miles around, and for some 

 thirty years he did the greater part of the surgery in 

 this section of Louisiana. Rich and poor he treated 

 alike, and multitudes can testify that he tended them 

 without hope of remuneration ; not only this, but 

 he sometimes aided the patient from his own 

 pocket. 



During the yellow-fever epidemic of 1878, in 

 which he himself was stricken with the fever, he 

 was health officer of Baton Rouge, and to his efforts 



