author
Spencer Glasgow Welch
1834–1916
A Civil War surgeon left behind vivid letters that bring camp life, battlefield medicine, and the strain of separation into sharp focus. This collection offers a personal window into the war through the eyes of a South Carolina doctor writing to his wife.
1 Audiobook
A Confederate surgeon's letters to his wife
by Spencer Glasgow Welch
About the author
Born in 1834, Spencer Glasgow Welch was a South Carolina physician who served as a surgeon with the 13th South Carolina during the American Civil War. He is remembered for the letters he wrote to his wife during the conflict, describing marches, battles, medical work, and everyday army life from a deeply personal point of view.
Those letters were later gathered into A Confederate Surgeon's Letters to His Wife, published in 1911 and edited by his daughter. The book has lasted because it blends intimate family correspondence with firsthand observations of war, giving readers a close-up look at both military medicine and the emotional cost of the era.
Welch died in 1916. Today, his writing is valued less as polished literary memoir than as a direct, human record of experience — the voice of a doctor, husband, and witness trying to make sense of extraordinary events as they happened.