author
Spencer Glasgow Welch
1834–1916
A South Carolina physician and Confederate army surgeon, he is best remembered for the Civil War letters he wrote to his wife, later published as a vivid firsthand memoir. His writing offers a personal view of camp life, battlefields, and medical work during the war.
1 Audiobook
A Confederate surgeon's letters to his wife
by Spencer Glasgow Welch
About the author
Born in 1834 and died in 1916, Spencer Glasgow Welch was a doctor from Newberry County, South Carolina. During the American Civil War, he served as surgeon of the 13th South Carolina Volunteers, and his surviving letters became the basis of his best-known book, A Confederate Surgeon’s Letters to His Wife.
That book, published in 1911, gathers his wartime correspondence into a firsthand account of marches, battles, military hospitals, and everyday army life. Readers often come to it for its immediacy: it preserves the voice of a working physician writing from the field to someone he loved.
Welch is remembered today less as a literary figure than as a witness. His letters remain of interest to readers of Civil War history because they combine personal feeling with close observation of a surgeon’s duties in the Confederate army.