Saga of a Civil War surgeon
There are 2,000 plaques and other memorials on what was once the Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg, Pa. Only one is dedicated to a physician, Zabdiel Boylston Adams, an 1853 graduate of Harvard Medical School. The story of Adams, including his famous Boston lineage, Civil War service, and postwar practice, was recently told at the Countway Library of Medicine, part of a series of lectures on medicine during the murderous national conflict 150 years ago. “He jumped right in,” said Mitchell L. Adams ’66, M.B.A. ’69, of his great-grandfather’s service, “and was in it from the beginning to Appomattox,” when Southern forces surrendered. Mitchell Adams, who delivered the lecture, is a former member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers and recently retired after 10 years as executive director of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. Along with many other tales, he told of his ancestor’s Gettysburg experience. On the afternoon of July 2, 1863, the doctor set...