[The following is an account of the punishment of an Irish Brigade deserter during the American Civil War. Here, William Chestor Minor, an Army surgeon who would later go on to become one of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, was forced to administer the punishment, something that haunted him for the rest of his life and certainly contributed to the insanity that would plague him in the years after the war.]
An Irish deserter, who had been convicted at drumhead of running away during the terrors of the Wilderness, was sentenced to be branded. The officers of the court – there would have been a colonel, four captains, and three lieutenants – demanded in this case that the new young acting assistant surgeon who had been assigned to them, this fresh-faced and genteel-looking aristocrat, this Yalie, fresh down from the hills of New England, be instructed to carry out the punishment. It would be as good a way as any, the old war-weary officers implied, to induct Doctor Minor into the rigors of war. And so the Irishman was brought to him, his arms shackled behind his back.
He was a dirty and unkempt man in his early twenties, his dark uniform torn to rags by the frantic, desperate run through the brambles. He was exhausted and frightened. He was like an animal – a far cry from the young lad who had arrived, cocksure and full of Dublin mischief, on the West Side of Manhattan three years earlier.
[…]
But now he had made the mistake of trying to run, and five soldiers from the provost marshal’s unit, on the lookout for him, had grabbed him from where he had been hiding behind the barn on a farm up in the foothills. The court-martial had been assembled all too quickly and, as with all drumhead justice, the sentence was handed down in a brutally short time: He was to be flogged, thirty lashes with the cat – but only after being seared with a branding iron, the mark of desertion forever to scar his face.
He pleaded with the court; he pleaded with his guards. He cried, he screamed, he struggled. But the soldiers held him down, and Doctor Minor took the hot iron from a basket of glowing coals that had been hastily borrowed form the brigade farrier. He hesitated for a moment – a hesitation that betrayed his own reluctance – for was this, he wondered briefly, truly permitted under the terms of his Hippocratic oath? The officers grunted for him to continue – and he pressed the glowing metal onto the Irishman’s cheek. The flesh sizzled, the blood bubbled and steamed; the prisoner screamed and screamed.
Source:
Winchester, Simon. “The Madness of War.” The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. HarperPerennial, 1999. 60-1. Print.
Further Reading;
William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minor
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