Contract Surgeon - Lawrence, MA

Item MED-9304

Description

House of Representatives report on a pension request filed by Caroline G. Seyfforth on behalf of her husband - Edmund Seyfforth, Surgeon - Lawrence, MA, 1862 - 1865.

Extract from Military Images article entitled “Lost an Arm in Freedom’s Fray: Union Amputees after Gettysburg”.
"The final surgery on Pvt Edmund Craft, 126 NY Infantry, performed by Contract Surgeon Edmund Seyfforth, was listed as one of 47 cases of “Successful Secondary Amputations at the Shoulder for Shot Injury,” in the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion.
The noteworthiness of Seyfforth’s operation likely prompted this portrait of Craft by photographer Joshua Appleby Williams of Newport, R.I. It was found in an album owned by Miss Annie M. Strout, who served as a nurse at Lovell.
Seyfforth shared more than a common first name with his patient. While performing an operation at Lovell sometime after Craft’s successful amputation, Seyfforth cut his own hand. Blood poisoning necessitated the amputation of several of his fingers and part of his hand. After Seyfforth died in the mid-1870s, his wife struggled to secure a widow’s pension. In 1888, she gained approval from the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Invalid Pensions. But President Grover Cleveland, a nemesis of the pension system, vetoed it on grounds that Seyfforth “had several spells of alcoholism after the war,” and found that the doctor’s troubles were “due to habits of intemperance” and not his injury."