Before Doogie Howser

The winners generally get to name the war. Had the South won the American Civil War, we might know it today as the War Between the States, the War of Northern Aggression or perhaps, in a masterpiece of understatement, the Disagreement.

It was the latter that Nick Taylor chose as the title of his excellent debut novel, The Disagreement (2008), which focuses not on battles but on the medical care for wounded soldiers in the South. Much has been written about the difficulty the less industrial Confederacy had acquiring arms and ammunition, but Taylor puts his focus on the shortage, and eventual absence, of quinine and other necessary drugs and medical supplies. Eventually traditional home remedies were all that was available to hospital doctors.

Still in his mid-teens when the war breaks out, John Muro is the son of a Virginian who gave up his medical practice for a presumably more lucrative career in business, manufacturing Confederate uniforms. After a nephew returns from an early battle missing a limb, the father decides to send John to medical school to protect him from combat. Because of the large number of wounded soldiers, John, still just 17, and his fellow medical students are thrown into full-time on-the-job training. He is still a teenager when, by necessity, he becomes a full-fledged doctor and, because of his skills, is soon mentioned as the likely postwar head of the hospital.

Meanwhile John falls in love with Lorrie, the niece of his professor; develops a close friendship with a Union soldier whose life he saves (then gets a scolding for wasting precious medicine on an enemy) and becomes increasingly estranged from his family. The war, we find, is not the only disagreement in this tale.

Taylor's novel provides readers with a fine story, but also an intriguing look inside a bit of history we might otherwise have never given a thought.