"M" is for Moore, Samuel Preston (1813-1889)

"M" is for Moore, Samuel Preston (1813-1889). Surgeon General for the Confederacy. After graduating from the Medical College of South Carolina, Moore was commissioned as a surgeon in the U.S. Army and spent the next twenty-five years in uniform. He resigned from the army in 1861 and Jefferson Davis appointed him acting surgeon general of the Confederacy. Moore faced a daunting task of creating Southern medical services from scratch. Eventually he was able to field a medical corps of three thousand officers. He also had to create a series of medical laboratories to supply medical units. Moore oversaw each hospital in the South through personal visits and correspondence. Samuel Preston Moore’s greatest accomplishment might have been the vaccination of the entire Southern army against smallpox in only six weeks, a controversial decision in 1862.