ROBERT M. "MICK" BEDARD
presents
"CW Naval Medicine;
A Comparison with Army Medicine"
About the Topic:
Dr. Robert “Mick” Bedard will supplement the presentation on Civil War medicine by its past President Dr. Jon Willen. Dr. Willen’s talk is posted on YouTube and available by visiting https://cwrtdc-audio.blogspot.com/p/jonwillen-cwrtdc-zoom1.html
Dr. Bedard will explain how the medical issues described by Dr. Willen for ACW Army surgeons were in many wats the same for ship board naval doctors, but he will discuss certain important differences. His presentation will feature contemporaneous -- and at times satirical -- illustrations of Dr. Charles Ellery Stedman (USN 1861-65) to support his analysis. Dr. Bedard will also cite various quarterly medical reports by Dr. R. Osgood Mason of the USS Santiago de Cuba while on Blockade Patrol in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
According to Dr. Bedard, both Stedman and Mason did their best in service and care, and he would like to offer a tribute to them.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Robert M. Mick" Bedard has been a member of the Round Table since 2017 and currently serves as its Treasurer. He was introduced to our group by Carol and John Bessette, his “cousins in law.”
Mick was born and raised in Massachusetts and graduated from Brown University and the University of Cincinnati Medical School. After an internal medicine residency at Medical Center Hospitals of Vermont in Burlington, he helped start a general medical practice in a small Wisconsin village before doing his Allergy/Immunology Fellowship at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
In 1984, Mick established an allergy and asthma solo practice in the Hartford Hospital Community. He merged his practice with several pediatric partners in 1996 to establish The Connecticut Asthma and Allergy Centers. After a long gratifying career, he retired in 2015, but continues as a member emeritus of the staff at Hartford Hospital. Mick has been a loyal member since 1984 of the Hartford Medical Society, the second oldest medical society in the United States. He was actively involved as a Board member and served two terms as President.
In 2018, Mick moved South to Alexandria, Virginia to become a “carpetbagger.” He has been a Civil War re-enactor since 1987 as a 5th New Hampshire Volunteer rifleman, assistant regimental surgeon and now a naval surgeon with the Kearsarge Afterguard. He has given numerous talks on Civil War Medicine in the States and Australia.
His outside interests included cheering for the Red Sox, stamp collecting, history reading and his beloved two grandchildren living in Switzerland.
Partial Bibliography:
- The Civil War Sketchbook of Charles Ellery Stedman: Biography and Commentary, by Jim Dan Hill, Presidio Press, 1976.
- War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865, by James M. McPherson, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2012.
- Life in Mr. Lincoln’s Navy by Dennis J. Pringle, Naval Institute Press, 1998
- Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War by Michael J. Bennett, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004
- The Alabama and the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil War by William Marvel, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996
- A Year on a Monitor and the Destruction of Ft. Sumter, by Alvah Hunter edited by Craig L. Symonds, Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1987
- Faces of the Civil War Navies: An Album of the Union and Confederate Sailors, by Ronald S. Coddington, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016
- Warships of the Civil War Navies, by Paul Silverstone Naval Institute Press, 1989
________________
