Country doctor aids both sides

Surgeon John Mutius Gaines, Army of Northern Virginia, worked amid the gore of war from the Battle of First Manassas to Appomattox. But in the midst of misery, he fell in love.

The second son of Edwin Ruthven Gaines and Mary Slaughter (Jurey) Gaines, John was born on the old Locust Hill Plantation, Culpeper County, Va., on Sept. 1, 1837.

Growing up on Locust Hill and coming from a wealthy family, young Gaines attended private schools in the Culpeper area. In June 1859, he graduated from the University of Virginia and shortly after from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, known as the “West Point” of the medical field.

He opened his first practice in Alexandria, where he was renting a room at the Marshall House when Union Col. Elmer Ellsworth was killed there.

In the early days of the war, Ellsworth’s militia regiment, the famous Fire Zouaves, were sent over the river to secure Alexandria. A Rebel flag flying over the Marshall House got Ellsworth’s attention, but after removing the offensive banner, he became a victim of the Southern landlord’s shotgun. In turn, one of the Zouaves instantly pulled a pistol, drew a bead on the assassin, and with an ounce of lead evened the score.

Dr. Gaines immediately appeared on the bloody scene, but it was too late — both men were dead. Col. Ellsworth, a good friend of President Lincoln, became the Union’s first martyr.

Shortly thereafter, Gaines closed down his Alexandria office and joined the Confederate Medical Corps. He was assigned as an assistant surgeon with the 8th Virginia Infantry. A regimental history describes the 24-year-old Virginian as “5 foot-11 inches tall, gray eyes, dark hair with a sandy complexion.”

Grim conditions

After the Battle of Antietam (called the Battle of Sharpsburg by the South) on Sept. 17, 1862, Dr. Gaines was left at Boonsboro, Md., to tend to the wounded of both sides. The small town, founded in 1792 and originally spelled “Boonsborough,” rests at the base of South Mountain just east of Sharpsburg.

Gaines, considered a prisoner of war, now faced some of the greatest challenges of his medical career. Working under the most grim conditions, he would have been familiar with the horrible ordeal of amputation.

A curious spectator to the still-smoking Antietam Battlefield witnessed and recorded one of these grueling operations: “Sept. 18, 1862 — Today I saw the leg above the knee taken off a large man. They first cut the flesh around where they intended to cut it off and then took up the arteries and tied the ends of them. Then shoved the flesh up the bone 3 or 4 inches, and then sawed it off. Drew the flesh back. Closed it together, and the job was done.”

Love and friendship

Dr. Otho Josiah Smith — known to his friends as O.J. — was a well-known physician in Boonsboro. This doctor, a huge property owner in Washington County, would soon cross paths with the surgeon from Virginia.

A local newspaper noted that after Antietam every church, house, barn and even hog pens from Boonsboro to the Potomac River were crammed full of wounded soldiers, making southern Washington County “one vast hospital.”

Dr. Smith owned a large farm two miles northeast of Sharpsburg bordering on Antietam Creek. The barn on this property was used as a hospital for Union and Confederate wounded.

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