Private Jacob F. Simmons, Company H, Eighty-second Pennsylvania Volunteers

Private Jacob F. Simmons

I was so struck by this image. The photographer has added a red arrow to show the trajectory of the bullet that caused Private Simmons’s wound. He instantly became Pelops in my mind.

“Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou was an American surgeon educated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Castleton Medical College (VT). When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he tended patients wounded during the battle of Big Bethel (Virginia), during the Monitor and Merrimac skirmish, and later during the siege at Yorktown in 1862. Bontecou’s extensive photographic documentation of soldiers' wounds during the Civil War informed medical treatment and were widely used to determine the degree of injury which determined of post-war pension payments.”

(Text rom Oakwood Cemetery, Troy, NY_

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