A Life Cut Short at the Little Big Horn: U.S. Army Surgeon George E. Lord

Of the three physicians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Doctor George Edwin Lord (1846-76) was the lone commissioned medical officer, an assistant surgeon with the United States Armys 7th Cavalry-one more soldier caught up in the U.S. governments efforts to fulfill what many people believed was the young countrys "Manifest Destiny." A Life Cut Short at the Little Big Horn tells Lords story for the first time. Notable for its unique angle on Custers last stand and for its depiction of frontier-era medicine, the book is above all a compelling portrait of the making of an army medical professional in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Drawing on newly discovered documents, Todd E. Harburn describes Lords education and training at Bowdoin College in Maine and the Chicago Medical College, detailing what the study of medicine entailed at the time for "a young man of promise . . . held in universal esteem." Lords time as a contract physician with the army took him in 1874 to the U.S. Northern Boundary Survey. From there Harburn recounts how, after a failed romance and the rigors of the U.S. Army Medical Board examination, the young doctor proceeded to his first-and only-appointment as a post surgeon, at Fort Buford in Dakota Territory. What followed, of course, was Lords service, and his death, in the Little Big Horn campaign, which this book shows us for the first time from the unique perspective of the surgeon.

A portrait of a singular figure in the milieu of the American militarys nineteenth-century medical elite, A Life Cut Short at the Little Big Horn offers a close look at a familiar chapter in U.S. history, and a reminder of the humanity lost in a battle that resonates to this day.