Apperson, John Samuel

Although the South clearly had to contend with serious and sustained shortages and labored under conditions of extreme difficulty that were unknown to its Northern adversary, it is important to bear in mind that through much of the war (especially before 1863), supplies were normally obtainable. In fact, twenty-four-year-old John Samuel Apperson remarked of his 1 st Virginia Brigade, I am sure I do no violence to the tmth when I say that I have never seen anything so abused in my life as medicine is here. Men take it entirely too much. i But sickness was real and efforts—however cmde— to alleviate it were attempted. Apperson s prescriptions of blue mass, opium, morphine, tannin, G. piU (probably gamboge piUs), castor oil, plumbs. Acct. (acetate of lead), and others, seem pretty routine for the peri od.2... 

John Samuel Apperson, Repairing the March of Mars The Civil War Diaries of John Samuel Apperson, edited by John Herbert Roper (Macon, GA Mercer University Press, 2001), p. 119. 

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