“No Job Less Enviable”: Surgeons and the Battle of Lundy’s Lane
As we recently outlined, all four sons of John and Magdalena Brown served at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, which is often referred to as one of the bloodiest battles of the War of 1812. Today, on the 208th anniversary of the battle, we look at it from a different perspective.
When the day’s fighting ends, the work of a military surgeon is only just beginning. Lundy’s Lane, and particularly William ‘Tiger’ Dunlop’s recollection of the events following the battle, offer poignant insight into the turmoil experienced by medical personnel in the chaos created by mass casualties.
“BUT O the joy of that battle — it was worth the whole of life.
You felt immortal in action with the rapture of the strife,
There in the dark by the river, with the flashes of fire before,
Running and crashing along, there in the dark, and the roar
Of the guns, and the shrilling cheers, and the knowledge that filled your heart
That there was a victory making and you must do your part,
But — there’s his grave in the orchard where the headstone glimmers white:
We could see it, we thought, from our window even on the darkest night;
It is set there for a sign that what one lad could do
Would be done by a hundred hundred lads whose hearts were stout and true.”
The Battle of Lundy's Lane, New York State Military Museum
Introduction
Map of the Niagara Frontier, 1869, Benson J. Lossing in The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812, Illustration. Reference Code: 971.034 LOS, page 382, Archives of Ontario Library. Red star added to mark the location of The Battle of Lundy’s Lane.
When the sun rose over Lundy’s Lane the morning after the fighting, the light washed over a battlefield that had experienced an immense amount of bloodshed. Over the course of six hours of battle on July 25th 1814, possession of high ground was passed between the Americans and British Regulars, which led to both armies declaring a victorious position. Despite the Americans declaring victory, the British under the command of Lieutenant-General Gordon Drummond were able to hold their position until the Americans withdrew in the early morning hours of July 26th. Much like the War of 1812 itself, The Battle of Lundy’s Lane has no clear victor.
The Battle of Lundy’s Lane is widely regarded as one of the bloodiest battles of the War of 1812, and is perhaps the deadliest battle to have ever taken place on Canadian soil. When the battle reached its conclusion, over 1,700 casualties had been suffered by the two opposing armies, with 258 men killed (1). In the aftermath of this battle, over 1,100 wounded troops had to be treated, and treated quickly, which highlights the importance of medical personnel to the function and success of armies. Lundy’s Lane stands as a testament, both to the horrors and violence of war, and to the empathy found for injured men in the process of medical treatment.
Medical Arrangements of 1812
War of 1812 physicians and surgeons have often garnered a negative reputation in the collective popular memory, including the association between surgeons and butchers. Surprisingly, this reputation is not a modern creation. Charles O’Neil, a soldier in the 28th Regiment of Foot who was injured at the Battle of Waterloo refused any operation on the grounds that “for every joint amputated the operating surgeon obtained an enormous price from the government”(2). This statement is completely false. At no point in the history of the British Army have surgeons ever been compensated for the number of limbs they amputated. But this myth became one that was commonly repeated by British soldiers.
Complaints about the inexperience of surgeons, particularly surgeons’ mates who were intended to act as a form of apprentice, were rampant among the soldiers. Grievances with the medical staff also touched on their emotional treatment of injured soldiers. Lieutenant-Colonel John Moore, for example, spoke ill of his medical personnel on a campaign to Ireland in 1790, stating that his surgeon was “Completely ignorant, devoid of humanity, and a rogue”(3). Yet, this was not the common experience people had with military surgeons. One of the best examples of compassionate behaviour is reflected in Surgeon John Hennen’s suggestion for pain relief for suffering soldiers. He states that injuries can be “[…] soon relieved by a mouthful of wine or spirits, or by an opioid, but above all, by the tenderness and sympathizing manner of the surgeon, and his assurance of the patient’s safety”(4).
Though the army was frequently used as a form of internship for recent graduates of medical school to gain practical experience, it did not mean that all military surgeons were inexperienced or untrained. Despite this, it is clear that military medicine lagged behind the treatment available to civilians. The first Director-General of the Royal Army Medical Corps, James McGrigor wrote that “the soldier should not be consigned to the ignorant and uneducated of the profession. He is clearly entitled to the same quality of medical advice as when he was a civilian”(5).
However, it was difficult to attract physicians to the military. Military medicine, despite providing the most practical experience to young physicians, was considered a lower form of the practice of medicine, and many physicians enlisted young only in order to gain employment experience before leaving the army to open a private civilian practice. Regardless of this bias against military physicians, medical figures who had valuable knowledge gained from working on soldiers would go on to publish numerous volumes of work that would influence medicine well into the rest of the nineteenth-century. Most prominently, figures like James Mann, James McGrigor, John Pringle, William ‘Tiger’ Dunlop, Dominique Jean Larrey, and George James Guthrie all emerge from a military background. In the early nineteenth century, the role of the military surgeon was somewhat being redefined. Increased militarism in British culture in the early nineteenth century led to a growing fascination amongst the British public with military figures like Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley. In April of 1812, Wellington became the first British officer to praise army doctors for their efforts after the Siege of Badajoz.(6) Through this credit, Wellington effectively redefined the role of the British military surgeon in Britain’s war efforts, and in doing so, made them invaluable to the British public’s perception and understanding of war.
Medicine at the dawn of the War of 1812 was by many of our modern standards barbaric. Despite our modern tendency to focus on the more romantic elements of military medicine, Napoleonic army medicine typically did not revolve around dramatic surgeries taking place in the aftermath of battle. Rather, preventative medicine and treating diseases in the troops (particularly on foreign campaigns) was perhaps the most important part of the regimental physician’s work. The treatment of diseases proved to be an enormous task, especially considering, as Matthew H. Kaufman cites, “it was not unusual for 20-30%, or occasionally 40%, of an army to be incapacitated or hospitalized at any one time”(7). As germ theory would not be formally discovered by Louis Pasteur until the 1860s, physicians and surgeons at the beginning of the nineteenth century relied primarily on the theory of miasma, or ‘bad air’.(8) This theory of a poisoned or infected atmosphere surrounding the sick led to successful developments in quarantine when the resources were available to medical practitioners, but resulted in catastrophic levels of infection within surgical patients. Particularly in the aftermath of battles, when army surgeons would be struggling to treat mass casualties and would not have time to wash their tools between patients let alone disinfect them, injured men would be exposed to the bodily fluids, and germs, of other soldiers making them far more prone to infection. The surgeons and physicians tasked with managing casualties were continuously fighting a losing battle against death.
Dominique Jean Larrey (1766-1842), grand figure de la chirurgie de guerre, Bibliothèque de l'Académie nationale de médecine
There were methods of pain control available to surgeons during the War of 1812, but they were difficult to have a ready supply of, especially in Niagara. Anesthesia would not be invented until 1846 or used in a military setting until the Crimean War in 1853.(9) Though surgeons had access to methods of pain relief such as opium and alcohol, the limited supply of these medicines would often mean that they were reserved for officers.(10) Wounded men would often be left on the battlefield for days or even weeks, laying in agony, before they would see any form of treatment. In one particularly dreadful case in Europe, Dr. Charles Bell recalls men still being pulled from the field more than two weeks after the Battle of Waterloo, many crying out for two things: water and mercy. (11) Though the field ambulance was invented and brought into consistent use by French physician Dominque Jean Larrey during the Napoleonic Wars, transporting injured men remained a painful and difficult task. Additionally, the difficult terrain in Niagara made Larrey’s ambulance ineffective and unusable, especially at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane. Transporting men to the field hospital was only the beginning of the challenge of managing mass casualties for physicians.
Charles Bell (1774-1842), Fixed Plate of a Leg Amputation, Wellcome Collection, 1821
Many battlefield injuries that required surgery resulted in amputation, earning physicians and surgeons their reputations as butchers whose main job was to take men apart. However, in order to fully comprehend the necessity of amputation on a nineteenth-century battlefield, we must consider that surgical intervention was almost exclusively a last resort. So, while we might view these surgeries as harsh or torturous by our modern standards, surgeons were still saving lives. To quote Dr. Danielle Jones, War of 1812 surgeons were “doing the best they could, with the information they had available to them at that time.” As modern audiences, we must reserve judgement on the perceived harshness of medical treatment.
The Battle of Lundy’s Lane
The Battle of Lundy’s Lane was particularly brutal. Fought between the hours of 6:00pm and Midnight, the battle was unusual in that it took place at night, and was the only battle of the War of 1812 to do so. Darkness, as suggested by Nina Edwards, often increases levels of fear and uneasiness in an already stressful situation.(12) Charles Bell, a Scottish anatomist and surgeon who volunteered at the Battle of Waterloo even noted this difference between military action (and aftermath) in the day versus the night, writing to his brother that, “It is impossible to convey to you the picture of human misery continuously before my eyes. What was heart-rending in the day was intolerable at night”(13). The darkness at Lundy’s Lane created such deep confusion and uncertainty that in the chaos of the battle, the British regulars actually fired upon the Glengarry Light Infantry, a fencible unit that was allied with their cause.(14)
John LeCouteur, a Lieutenant in the 104th Regiment of Foot, recorded his experience at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane in his journal, Merry Hearts Make Light Days. In his explanation the fear and anxiety caused by the battle is evident, as LeCouteur wrote:
It would be difficult to describe the feelings of us young Soldiers hurrying into action, with the roar of Artillery and Musketry pealing in Our front, sometimes rattling in heavy surges, sometimes scant, as if troops pressed were retiring. The echo through the woods too as we were not marching, but running up, for our anxiety to aid our hard-pressed comrades became painful and short breathed. Some old Hero talked of “this flesh trembling at the dangers his Spirit would launch into.” I am persuaded that many of us had that feeling.(15)
LeCouteur’s emotional recollection of the battle reveals the mindset that already impacted the soldiers and officers present at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane. We can only assume how these anxieties would stretch into medical treatment following the chaos of the battle.
C.W. Jefferys, "The Battle of Lundy's Lane," c. 1921, Government of Ontario Art Collection, 621234
The Battle of Lundy’s Lane had one of the highest casualty rates of the War of 1812, with 57% of the forces (approximately 1,731 of 3000 troops) injured, killed or taken prisoner. Though we do not know the extent of service of the Brown brothers who served in the Lincoln Militia at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, there is a possibility that they were part of the injured ranks or even acted as medics to help get men off the battlefield and to a surgeon. As the actions of the militia are poorly recorded in military histories, we can not be certain where exactly the Brown family was at Lundy’s Lane, but we can be certain that with over 1,100 injured men, the surgeons present at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane were tasked with an enormous undertaking.
Despite the lack of available field ambulances, most soldiers were transported off the battlefield. Many Americans were sent to Fort Erie or Buffalo, while the British were taken to Butler’s Barracks near Fort George in present day Niagara-on-the-Lake. This transportation, done using supply wagons, would have been unimaginably painful for injured soldiers awaiting medical attention from their regimental surgeons. Once they reached the makeshift field hospitals, the conditions were not much better. Supplies in field hospitals ran low, and surgeons were taxed beyond normal human ability, both physically and emotionally. One American surgeon, William Beaumont, recalled the conditions following the Battle of Lundy’s Lane as being a horrific place where:
[...] nothing but the Groans, of the wounded & agonies of the Dying are to be heard. The Surgeons, wading in blood, cutting of[f] arms, legs & trepanning heads to rescue their fellow creatures from untimely deaths - to hear the poor creatures, crying - Oh, Dear! Oh Dear! Oh My God! my God! Do, Doctor, Doctor! Do cut of[f] my leg! my arm! my head! to relieve me from my misery! I cant live! I cant live! - would have rent the heart of Steel & shocked the insensibility of the most harden’d assassin & the cruelest savage.(16)
William Dunlop
William 'Tiger' Dunlop (1792-1848), Kingston Picture Collection, V23 P-34
The most detailed account of the conditions for medical officers that followed the Battle of Lundy’s Lane are present in the memoir of surgeon William ‘Tiger’ Dunlop of the 89th Regiment of Foot. Dunlop similarly commented on the unpreparedness of the army to face the mass casualties arriving from Lundy’s Lane, as Dunlop described, “[...] upon inquiring where my wounded were to be put, I was shown a ruinous fabric, built of logs, called Butler’s Barracks, [...] Nothing could have been worse constructed for a hospital for wounded men [...] but there was a great want of room, so that many had to be laid on straw on the floor, and these had the best of it[.]”(17)
At the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, Dunlop, who had arrived in Niagara that day, was responsible for more than 220 wounded men, with no assistance but his hospital sergeant. Dunlop admits that he found this responsibility overwhelming, writing in his memoir that, “the charge was too much for us, and many a poor fellow had to submit to an amputation whose limb might have been preserved had there been only time to take reasonable care of it. But under the circumstances of the case it was necessary to convert a troublesome wound into a simple one, or to lose the patient’s life from want of time to pay him proper attention”(18). Dunlop’s own exhaustion in treating over 200 patients with little to no support was recorded in his memoir, as he recollected, “I never underwent such fatigue as I did for the first week at Butler’s Barracks. [...] For two days and two nights, I never sat down; [...] On the morning of the third day, however, I fell asleep on my feet, with my arm embracing the post of one of the berths. It was found impossible to awaken me[.]”(19) The lack of assistance grated on Dunlop, who sufficiently summarized this particular trouble as, “One of the many blunders of this blundering war, was that the Staff of the Army was never where it was wanted”(20)
Dunlop’s critiques of the British government, and their decision to fight in the War of 1812, are most apparent in his recount of Lundy’s Lane, which is unsurprising given the enormous amount of violence Dunlop was forced to face in the days following the battle. Dunlop’s reflection of the human cost of the War of 1812 is a plea to those separated from the war to recognize the horror of military violence, of the travesty of young lives cut brutally short for a political game. Dunlop’s passage on this cost warrants repeating in full. As he attempted to close the separation that exists between politicians and the frontlines, he wrote:
There is hardly on the face of the earth a less enviable situation than that of an Army Surgeon after a battle - worn out and fatigued in body and mind, surrounded by suffering, pain and misery, much of which he knows it is not in his power to heal of even to assuage. When the battle lasts these all pass unnoticed, but they come before the medical man afterwards in all their sorrow and horror, stripped of all of the excitement of the “heady fight.”
It would be a useful lesson to cold-blooded politicians, who calculate on a war costing so many lives and so many limbs as they would calculate on a horse costing so many pounds - or to the thoughtless at home, whom the excitement of a gazette, or the glare of an illumination, more than reconciles to the expense of a war - to witness such a scene, if only for one hour.(21)
Butler’s Barracks, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario
Conclusion
The War of 1812 is often referred to as the ‘Forgotten War.’ Canadian history tends to focus on the larger and more definitive victories that came from the First World War only a century later, and early nineteenth century British history calls more attention to the fight against Napoleon than to the small conflict happening in North America at the same time. However, this small conflict still resulted in over 30,000 casualties (American, British, and Indigenous allies combined) at the conclusion of the war in Spring of 1815.(22) This statistic can often be lost to the greater narrative of the War of 1812, yet these 30,000 casualties are important. These 30,000 casualties had names, lives, and people who loved them, and their lives were permanently altered by this conflict. As residents of Niagara, many of us travel on a daily basis through the places where these battles were fought. How often do we think about these people, and the lives they might have otherwise lived? It is our duty to ensure they are not forgotten.
In Duncan Scott Campbell’s poem, “The Battle of Lundy’s Lane,” which opened this article, the narrator tries to convince his wife of the noble sacrifice of their son, Abner, who was killed during the battle. Campbell’s lines of a grieving mother’s response cut the concept of noble sacrifice to the bone. The poem goes:
“I'd try to speak of the glory to give her a little joy.
What is the glory to me when I want my boy, my boy !”(23)
In the grand romantic narrative of war, we can sometimes lose sight of the enormous cost that is associated with it. We, in 2022, get distracted by the bright redcoats and the slow-loading but flashy muskets and can forget to see the people underneath. This is even true in present day conflicts. As war rages right now in Ukraine, are we the “thoughtless at home…” as Dunlop wrote… momentarily moved by “the excitement of a gazette…”? Looking towards medical treatment, and the excerpts of surgeons’ diaries and journals paints a vital picture of the devastation caused by battle.
Proven by the emotional passages present in these texts, surgeons, like William Dunlop, were profoundly impacted by the horrors that they encountered and attempted to treat. Their call for compassion and concern for the soldiers in their care reveals the compassion that was present even in the midst of the bloodiest battle of the War of 1812. The medical arrangements in the aftermath of the brutality of the Battle of Lundy’s Lane are a glimpse of the humanity that survives on a battlefield, even when said field is soaked in bloodshed.
(1) Donald E. Graves, Where right and glory lead!: The Battle of Lundy’s Lane, 1814 (Toronto: Robin Brass, 1997), 195-196.
(2) Phillip J. Haythornthwaite, The Armies of Wellington (Leicester: Brockhampton Press, 1998), 139.
(3) Martin Howard, Wellington’s Doctors: The British Army Medical Services in the Napoleonic Wars (Kent: Spellmount, 2002), 37.
(4) James Hennen, Principles of Military Surgery. (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1830), 48.
(5) Sir James McGrigor, The Autobiography and Services of Sir James McGrigor, bart. Late director-general of the Army Medical Department (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861), 95.
(6) Howard, Wellington’s Doctors, 2.
(7) Matthew H. Kaufman, Surgeons at War (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2000), 1.
(8) Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), 259.
(9) Henry Connor, “The Use of Chloroform by British Army Surgeons During the Crimean War,” Medical History 42, no. 2 (1998): 161-193.
(10) S. E. D. Shortt, “Physicians, Science, and Status: Issues in the Professionalization of Anglo-American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century,” Medical History 27 (1983): 53.
(11) Sir Charles Bell, Letters of Sir Charles Bell: Selected from his correspondence with his brother George Joseph Bell (London: John Murray, 1870), 246.
(12) Nina Edwards, Darkness: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 12.
(13) Bell, Letters of Sir Charles Bell, 247
(14) John LeCouteur, Merry Hearts Make Light Days: The War of 1812 Journal of Lieutenant John LeCouteur, 104th Foot (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1993), 175.
(15) LeCouteur, Merry Hearts Make Light Days, 173.
(16) Quoted in Graves, Where right and glory lead!, 199. This quote has been altered only to improve readability.
(17) William Dunlop, Tiger Dunlop’s Upper Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967), 33-34.
(18) Dunlop, Tiger Dunlop’s Upper Canada, 34.
(19) Dunlop, Tiger Dunlop’s Upper Canada, 35.
(20) Dunlop, Tiger Dunlop’s Upper Canada, 34.
(21) Dunlop, Tiger Dunlop’s Upper Canada, 34-35.
(22) Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 306.
(23) Duncan Scott Campbell, Lundy’s Lane and Other Poems, (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1916), 18.
Author Bio
Kaitlyn Carter [M.A. History, Western University] is the Development Coordinator at The Brown Homestead. Kaitlyn has specialized in the modern period in Britain and Canada since 2018, with a focus on military medicine and emotion. Her M.A. thesis (2021) focused on the gendered nationalism exhibited by Canadians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In September, Kaitlyn will be departing The Brown Homestead to pursue an MA in History at Brock University, where she intends to study the broader history of emotions in the War of 1812 before embarking on a PhD program in 2023.