directly from the field. I think also that all who experienced
confinement in the two places are united in pronouncing Florence to be,
on the whole, much the worse place and more fatal to life.

The medicines furnished the sick were quite simple in nature and mainly
composed of indigenous substances. For diarrhea red pepper and
decoctions of blackberry root and of pine leave were given. For coughs
and lung diseases, a decoction of wild cherry bark was administered.
Chills and fever were treated with decoctions of dogwood bark, and fever
patients who craved something sour, were given a weak acid drink, made by
fermenting a small quantity of meal in a barrel of water. All these
remedies were quite good in their way, and would have benefitted the
patients had they been accompanied by proper shelter, food and clothing.
But it was idle to attempt to arrest with blackberry root the diarrhea,
or with wild cherry bark the consumption of a man lying in a cold, damp,
mud hovel, devoured by vermin, and struggling to maintain life upon less
than a pint of unsalted corn meal per diem.

Finding that the doctors issued red pepper for diarrhea, and an imitation
of sweet oil made from peanuts, for the gangrenous sores above described,
I reported to them an imaginary comrade in my tent, whose symptoms
indicated those remedies, and succeeded in drawing a small quantity of
each, two or three times a week. The red pepper I used to warm up our
bread and mush, and give some different taste to the corn meal, which had
now become so loathsome to us. The peanut oil served to give a hint of
the animal food we hungered for. It was greasy, and as we did not have
any meat for three months, even this flimsy substitute was inexpressibly
grateful to palate and stomach. But one morning the Hospital Steward
made a mistake, and gave me castor oil instead, and the consequences were
unpleasant.