Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests

FIGURE 2.2. Francis Peyre Porcher was from one of the prominent families of Charleston, South Carolina. Fils Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests was the basis for the Confederacy s indigenous supply table, and is today considered a classic of American medical botany. Photo courtesy of the Waring Historical Library, Medical University of South Carolina. 

Although these random sources of drug substitutes were often tried and abandoned, the one quasi-official source was Francis Peyre Porcher s (1824-1895) Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests. Moore actually commissioned the South Carolina physician to prepare a work of indigenous plant-drug substitutes, and even years later... 

Much reliable information on this subject may be obtained from the work on Medical Botany, entitled Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, prepared by Surgeon F. P. Porcher, P. A. C. S., under instructions from this office. 

A Selected List of Medicinal Substances from Porcher s Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests... 

See, for example, Frank R. Freemon, Microbes and Minnie Balls An Annotated Bibliography of Civil War Medicine (Rutherford, NJ Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993). Freeman claims that Porcher s Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests contains nothing of modern medical importance (p. 112). Similarly, see Norman Franke, Medico-Pharmaceutical Conditions and Drug Supply in the Confederate States of America, 1861-1865, (Unpublished PhD dissertation. 

One final resource specific to the Confederacy should be mentioned it is the enormously valuable Documenting the American South Web site of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where many extremely helpful primary sources are available full-text, online. Circulars, reports, and handbooks from the Surgeon General s Office are available, including Francis Peyre Porcher s Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests (Charleston, SC Evans and Cogswell, 1863). 

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