Historian Ira M. Rutkow in Bleeding Blue and Gray framed Hammond’s efforts to ban calomel as something which undermined the support he enjoyed from the medical field. Historians George Smith and Michael Flannery cover the history of Civil War-era medicine and pharmacy practices including methods for the manufacture of calomel at army-owned medical factories and how different schools of medicine viewed calomel. Primary source material includes papers from 1863 after Hammond’s publication of Circular no. 6 which were either pro-calomel sources which cast doubt on Hammond’s conclusions or anti-calomel papers which supported and praised Hammond for a breakthrough in medicine. The Calomel Song, published in 1880 but popular in Boston in the years before reflects the negative views towards calomel in mid-nineteenth-century North America.
This poster presentation examines three strands of the calomel controversy during the Civil War. First, medical practices of “heroic dosages” stipulated that large doses of this medicine should be given to achieve visible effects. Yet the effects of calomel were poorly understood; when given as a medicine, the drug served to only further strain a sick patient. In high concentrations the drug caused mercurial gangrene which disfigured the body, possibly leading to death. Second, Hammond attempted to reform this practice in the spring of 1863 through Circular no. 6 which removed calomel from the supply acquisition table in an attempt to ban any further acquisition and use. This ban came as a response to evidence of the dangerous effects of heroic dosing. Third, institutional and interpersonal tensions emerged after Hammond’s circular caused him to lose the support from the medical field from which he owed his political support. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who openly loathed Hammond, had only supported his appointment because of the backing of peer physicians. Without the backing of the medical field, Hammond was court-martialed on unrelated charges and replaced by Joseph K. Barnes, the former personal doctor of Secretary Stanton. Calomel returned to the 1864 supply table and remained in use for the remainder of the US Civil War. The medical standards pertaining to calomel dosing were not decided by scientific evidence of the compiled reports given to Hammond and his personal observations, but by the failures of state and medical infrastructures which were determined by the internal facing power struggles among government personnel, not Hammond’s diligent and professional executions of his duty.