Peter Charles Remondino Autobiography (1846-1926)
Transcript of an original document on file at the San Diego Historical Society, Dr. P.C. Remondino Papers, MS-4.
In the early spring months of 1861, before the outbreak of the civil War, the doctor entered the office of Dr. Francis H. Milligan, a Jefferson graduate, as a medical student. The doctor, as observed by young Remondino, was a most practical man in all senses, one of those who believed in teaching and doing the things themselves, in place of simply teaching and memorizing words and their -- at times very misty and variable -- meanings. To those ends and to start his student in the right and most profitable path at once, he advised the latter to call on Mr. Joseph Rogue and inquire whether be would have any objection to his securing the skeleton of an Indian whom Mr. Roque had shot dead some years before and who had been buried in a piece of marsh land at a little distance from his house which stood on an adjoining hill. Mr. Roque not only granted the student's request but took him down the hill and pointed out the exact locality of the grave. This piece of land was yearly overflowed by the waters of the Mississippi in every spring freshet, remaining so for a month or more at a time.
The doctor next day accompanied his student who was quite enthusiastic at this practical initiation into the mysteries of medicine. Arriving at the place the preceptor became the director of operations and his student the interested laborer, conscious that he was then actually working his way into the medical profession. The spring overflow had receded about a month previously, leaving the ground soft to work, besides the, Indians buried their, dead either in very shallow graves not more than two feet in depth, or left them to mummified on high scaffolds enwrapped in their blanket, The several inundations had done away with all the soft parts or tissues, so that they found the bones clean and dry but of the color of browned ivory and otherwise all in a perfect state of preservation and not the smallest bone missing.
With the assistance of the preceptor the student wired the obtained skeleton very properly. This being done the doctor delivered a general lecture on the skeleton, but to make the subject more clear and comprehensible the student was advised, by whatever means he might choose to elect to procure as large and well developed Tommy cat as possible, which he would assist to dissect, so that through the dissection the student might obtain a working knowledge of the relation that exists between general anatomy and general physiology, thus giving him the reasons for the placing of the different organs and a general idea of the physiological functions of each organ and its relations to biology.
The student, as he expressed it, found this combination of studies most helpful, far more easy to learn by the constant relation in regard to the co-ordination of the parts and their functions, than if each had been studied separately. His form of coordinating anatomical and physiologic studies and its advantages is particularly noticeable in the study of the base of the skull where the conjoined studies should always include that of the base of the brain and the distribution of the cranial nerves.
It was the intention of the doctor's preceptor that his pupil should possess a thorough and comprehensive knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and chemistry, as then taught, before he should enter a medical college. But it happened that after thoroughly initiating his young student into the study of these three branches of medicine he accepted a position in the volunteer medical corps of the army of his state being appointed to one of the Minnesota infantry regiments.
The departure of his preceptor for the army, however, did not interfere with the doctor's studies at least not as far as his work with books and the study of comparative anatomy and physiology were concerned. The opportunities for the prosecution of the latter studies were simply unending, and the greater the scope of those opportunities, the better and clearer became his knowledge of human anatomy and physiology. Thus it occurred that while he sadly missed his preceptors daily quizzes, as well as the daily clinics and accompanying practical explanations and short lectures on medical and surgical subjects as the opportunities for them had occurred, the absence of those instructive entertainment created a vacuum which was speedily refilled by an increased interest in the studies of natural history and physics, into which he entered with great enthusiasm.
Dr. Milligan, as said, was himself a most practical, systematic, scientific, and methodical student. With him this was an inheritance from his Scottish-Irish ancestry. While at the Jefferson college, his room-mate and study chum had been James Aitken Meigs who must at that period have been one of the hardest plodding and incessantly working students in his class who, at the solicitation of his old friend and room-mate, became young Remondino's preceptorial guide and advisor during the entire term of his student days in Philadelphia. Dr. Meigs, as well known, was a devoted student of natural history; the study upon which he looked as the basis of all the sciences. He was also one of the most active members of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and probably, at that period, one of the most finished -- and that also in a complete comparative sense -- anatomical and physiological students in the city and well fit to be classed with Prof. Leidy who was also a devoted student of natural history and at the time occupied the Chair of Anatomy at the University. On the death of Prof. Robley Dunglison, such were the well known attainments and scientific standings of Dr. Meigs, that he was at once called to fill Dr. Dunglison's chair in his own Alma Mater.
The intimate associations young Remondino formed at the time with Dr. Meigs were of the greatest benefit to the younger student as from his new preceptor, who was greatly pleased to find in his old college chum's pupil such an earnest and advanced student of natural history, that the latter was afforded every opportunity for the further prosecution of these studies that Dr. Meigs connection with the Academy of Natural Sciences placed him in position to offer.
Dr. Milligan had thoroughly initiated his pupil into the habit that had been systematically and religiously followed by himself and Dr. Meigs when students. This being, after retiring for the night and extinguishing the lights; the student was, through a process of great mental rumination, to go over all that had been studied, learned or lectured upon during the day. Beginning with the rising hours and thence on to bedtime, every past hour of the day was to be sifted and searched for whatever advances had been made in any scientific line. This was to be subjected to a close scrutiny to make sure that it was all well understood and all its values fully appreciated. If any of these subjects were found to be only partly or obscurely understood, the student was to make a mental note of all that was imperfectly understood so that on the morrow a clearance study should be made, as opportunity afforded, and the subject not discharged from the mind until a clear understanding of it had been fully and satisfactorily obtained.
"The great advantage of this plan of having an established daily educational clearing house of the above order", observed Dr. Remondino, "must be evident to any one who has enlisted himself for the rest of his life to follow a student's career as it is only the determined, constant, loyal and devoted student of the Sciences that best can understand and fully appreciate the meaning of the old saying or adage that 'art is long, life is short. He, above all others, possesses the most minute and conscientious appreciation of the value of time, and is the least disposed to waste any of it."
It is therefore very plain that this nightly reviewing and analyzing of all the work accomplished during the day, is he greatest time savor imaginable, as by its nightly checking up of all its newly learned details, it doubly impresses a subject that has passed this secondary mental scrutiny upon the tablets of the casual memory, which is by all means the most analyzing reasoning, futurely the most available, practicable and retentive of all memories; while that which has been only half learned or understood and therefore in the end only become mental waste-basket material, will become, by its thorough reconsideration and immediate study, so much more available knowledge added to our stock, and for the subconscious but ever active memory to classify, label, and place away in its appropriate pigeon hale, of which it alone carries the keys.
During the first two years of the Civil War, a fear more or less pervaded the then frontier states of Iowa and Minnesota that that ubiquitous and enterprising Confederate, General Price, might make a raid on their western limits, so that home guards had been formed and armed by the state to be drilled into the manual of arms and military maneuvers by competent officers. E. W. Foster was the first captain of the Wabasha City Rifles, as the company was named. Young Remondino, as a matter of patriotic duty became one of its charter members and was drilled at first with such single barreled fouling-pieces as each member could procure.
The doctor's arm was an old bored-out Indian rifle which he had used as a shot gun from boyhood in hunting. As in that region all boys became owners of a gun of some sort as soon as able to carry and load one, the company found no difficulty in being all well armed. The state, however, later on, sent down from St. Paul fifty Belgian regulation military muskets with their long bayonets and the United States regulation accoutrements, cross belts, cartridge boxes, and the buffalo skin lined cap boxes, wherewith to make the company into real soldiers. The uniform consisted of trousers of white drilling, a sky blue small coat or Eaton single breasted jacket with a liberal supply of bright eagle buttons, and a fatigue cap of the most approved French pattern.
The company served as a pepiniere, or nursery, for the production of well trained officers for the army as it distinguished itself by furnishing two colonels and any number of captains and lieutenants to the various Minnesota volunteer regiments. Thru some oversight in the report of the Adjutant General's office, in which was a compilation of all the troops Minnesota furnished to the Union Army or in its own home defense during the Indian uprising of 1862, there are no mentions whatever made of the existence of this company. As its arms and accoutrement came from that office, there should certainly be some record of their shipment as well as of their return somewhere in the official archives. Senator Addison Foster, now of the state of Washington, who was a resident of Wabasha at the time, and a brother of the captain of the same name could easily furnish the present Adjutant General of Minnesota with all the desired information on this subject so as to rectify this omission in its report made after the close of the Civil War.
At the urgent solicitation of his many patients, Dr. Milligan reluctantly resigned his position in the army and returned to his private practice. Young Remondino had in the meanwhile studied assiduously to that extent that his preceptor found him prepared to enter the Medical college classes in Philadelphia for which he departed in the early fall months of 1863.
After his matriculation, he became a member of Dr. D. D. Richardson's Quizz Class and one of the student staff at the northern Dispensary, then situated at the corner of 6th and Spring Garden streets and a regular attendant at the Pennsylvania hospital and the City Hospital clinics at Blockley. Thru his desire to avail himself of all opportunities to add to his practical education. He made friends of all the students holding positions in the many different military hospitals in Philadelphia as Acting Medical Cadets.
Thru these fellow-student acquaintances, the doctor was enabled to visit many of the hospitals and observe many details of military surgery, especially concerning the progress of repair in wounds and in operation. One that he visited most frequently was the Citizens Volunteer Hospital at Broad street, immediately opposite to the Baltimore & Ohio rail-road station. It was in this hospital that he watched the coarse of the first case of severe heart strain and partial rupture he had seen, occasioned in an infantry soldier of the army of the Potomac while attempting with many other soldiers to lift he wheels of a field cannon that, while being hurried to its position, had become helplessly embedded in the Virginia mud. He presented a very vivid and impressioning as well as an unforgettable picture as he struggled for breath. It is now many years ago since he saw this poor fellow, a large full bearded powerful man, being continually fanned, sitting propped in a reclining rheal chair. He died some two weeks after having been brought to the hospital in a chair from the station.
In the year 1863, a total of 626 small actions and battles had been fought throughout the South in which were included those of Chancellorsville with 9,518 wounded, and that of Gettysburg, with 13,709 wounded a total of 23,227 wounded that were mostly distributed between the hospitals at Washington D.C., Annapolis, and the many hospitals in Philadelphia. These took a small army of civil surgeons, medical students and volunteer nurses to assist the regular hospital staffs in their care. The wounded of the more severe cases or those who required complicated operation were often only dressed by the surgeon with the aid of one of the Acting Cadets, so that Philadelphia medical students found plenty hospital work without going out of their city.
These hospital visits, with their endless varieties of wounds and organic injuries, afforded a continuous and therefore a most instructive clinic, as among the attending physicians and surgeons were to be met the most distinguished men of Philadelphia. The government, at the suggestion of some of those men, had established special hospitals where all the cases of a certain class were sent for observation and treatment. It was in one of those special hospitals that Hartshorne established the presence of permanently lasting cardiac asthenia as a soldier's disease, while in another special hospital were gathered cases of the results of injuries to the nervous system. It can well be said that, thru all these opportunities, one really devoted to the study of medicine could practically then learn more in six months, owing to the presence of the proper study material, than one could ordinarily observe and learn were he endowed with two or more long lives. In the order of instruction and study, they had the living subject before them, besides the many additional instructive details that resided in the autopsy examinations in the fatal cases, made to determine the true state of the involved pathologic states and the real or immediate death cause.
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