It is a rare male who, having achieved some success of the usual sort, can resist the conclusion that it must be because he is very intelligent or very virtuous. And being public-spirited, such a man is eager to make his wisdom available to family and friends. He thus develops a reputation as a dull person. Sometimes he is tempted to put his wisdom in a book about his life and thus develops a new reputation as a dull author. Such accounts litter the closets and attics of Illinois.
One author who is not dull is Silas Thompson Trowbridge (1823-1896) of Decatur. An Indianan by birth, Trowbridge practiced medicine without a license in small towns before settling in Decatur. After training in Chicago, he signed up as an Army surgeon. He was well regarded by peers medical and military and later was chosen president of the Illinois State Medical Society and U.S. Consul to Vera Cruz, Mexico, before retiring, as any sensible person would, to Napa Valley, California.
By turns eccentric, eloquent and informative, the book has a dozen faults typical of a DIY autobiography and a couple that are unique to it. A devoted family man, Trowbridge had purchased for his children a hand printing press and to give them something to print he wrote up his life’s adventures. (This is a rich subgenre; A Woman’s Story of Pioneer Illinois, Christiana Holmes Tillson’s record of her life in Montgomery County, also was written for her children.) So eager were these “busy fingers” to see the book on the printed page that they set his draft into type as fast as he wrote it. Thus the book survives – his draft with all its faults, their text with all their typos. The result was the Autobiography of Dr. Silas Thompson Trowbridge, M.D. It was published privately in 1874, but a reprint edition came out in 2004 as one of the excellent Shawnee Classics series from the Southern Illinois University Press and is still in print.
The main event in this life was our great Civil War, which Trowbridge experienced in both its glorious and its gruesome aspects. He served for three years and four months as a regimental surgeon with U.S. Grant’s western army during such decisive battles as Fort Donelson and the siege of Vicksburg. His version corrected from memory then-accepted accounts of some battles, settled a few scores and recalled in detail the state of the art, if it can be called that, of the military medicine of that day.
Trowbridge also witnessed the often-antic nature of combat. One senior officer had a shell burst in his tent while he was in it, “perfectly demolishing every thing but himself, he stepping out of the midst of the ruins and swearing that if he was not one of the best Christians in the world he would have been killed outright. But when he discovered a fine gold watch, a present from his father, totally ground to atoms I thought his Christianity the most vehement and demonstrative I had ever seen.”
Even readers jaded by graphic modern films are likely to find his lively accounts of the realities of combat disturbing. About the fighting around Corinth, Mississippi, he recalled that he and his colleagues operated nonstop for two weeks before the battlefield was cleared of wounded, their hands so continuously in blood that “they were crisped and wrinkled like a washerwoman’s after a day in her suds.”
The doctor’s postwar life was less bloody but not much less eventful. He watched a crew fend off the hijacking of a steamboat by brigands on a river trip to New Madrid, Missouri, promoted a couple of eccentric pet causes (he was against the wearing of mourning clothes) and strengthened his wife’s weak lungs by organizing a brass band for her to play in. He also accompanied (in his medical capacity) a trainload of newspaper editors on a railroad publicity junket. Such trips were undergrad spring vacations for men past their prime who reveled in drinking and cosplay. (The entertainment included staged Indian attacks.) Trowbridge accurately described this one as a “grand cavalcade of sensationalists on a rampage.”
In a world full of unread books, why read this one? To vicariously live a bit of the past, for one, or to learn about war and our own nation’s great rebellion. And because through Trowbridge we learn a bit about the unnamed Illinois men (and boys) who served and suffered with him in the 8th Illinois Volunteers. They, like the author, were made military men by events but undertook the danger, the drudgery and the separation from family and livelihood willingly. Today’s readers might pause to reflect whether they and their neighbors might be willing to spend as much if asked to help settle a civil war that now is in its 166th year.
James Krohe is the author of Corn Kings & One-horse Thieves, a lively history of Illinois’ middle third.
This article appears in March 5-11, 2026.
