R.L. Johnson Medical Journal Now Online!

The BDC recently added its eighth contribution to the Lowcountry Digital Library: R.L. Johnson Medical Journal, 1863-1864, 1867-1883! It posted on February 1, 2019.

R.L. Johnson Medical Journal, [p. 8] (BDC)

Richard Love Johnson (1841 – 1913) served the Confederacy as an Assistant Surgeon with several units, most notably the 3^rd and 15^th South Carolina Infantries. Johnson was stationed at various posts during the Civil War including McPhersonville in Beaufort District. [The necessary Beaufort connection!] His handwritten entries contain the names and units of his patients, notes on their wounds, treatments, surgeries and outcomes from 1863 to 1864. 

Following the Civil War, Johnson and his family resided on Edisto Island for several years where he turned to practicing obstetrics most often at John Wright’s Seaside Plantation and Dr. William M. Bailey’s Maxcy’s Plantation. 

He also documents two veterinary cases: a cat giving birth and the removal of a tumor from a donkey’s eye. 

During his time on Edisto Island he kept accounts relating to managing a small cotton farm with freed African-American laborers. He includes the names and payments to his workers.

Johnson would later practice medicine in Louisiana and Missouri. 

He revised the journal several times adding notes about medical journal articles and updates regarding some of his patients seen in other circumstances. The latest note with a date was done in 1883. Johnson died and was buried in Rolla, Phelps County, Missouri in 1913. 

This journal is significant because Johnson’s depictions give a firsthand view of medical practices during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras when prescribing whiskey, eggs, and opium were standard treatments. The medical cases and farm accounts typically include the names of individuals involved and thus may be useful for genealogical purposes.

Getting a primary source document for its online debut requires a lot of work and oftentimes the skills of several or many people. In the case of the R.L. Johnson Medical Journal,  I must give credit where credit is due.

The bulk of the work fell to the BDC's former Preservation Associate, Amanda Forbes. She did almost all of the digital scans, did most of the transcription, all the coding, and as her last act of employment sent scan and metadata files to Leah Worthington at the Lowcountry Digital Library.
Kristi Spaulding Marshall proofread the transcription several times to make sure that when it left our hands, it would be as perfect as it could be.

Leah Worthington is the Digital Projects Librarian at the College of Charleston who coordinates the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative and the Lowcountry Digital Library. I asked that the Journal go up at some point between January and April 2019. She oversaw the technology applications to get the Medical Journal uploaded and posted to the LCDL website. Leah got everything done so the journal became available for use by anyone anywhere in the whole world with an internet connection to use by closing time on Friday, February 1st.


I picked the project; oversaw its implementation; wrote the collection page introduction for the LCDL website; edited the Finding Aid; and posted the Finding Aid into our BDC WordPress blog.

Way back in 2007, Beaufort County Library contributed its first collection, Phosphate, Farms and Family: The Donner Collection to the LCDL. It has since been joined by selections from the Lucille Hasell Culp Collection; images from the Hurricane of 1893; a booklet of survival stories from the Hurricane of 1893; a postcard collection; and two collections of stereoscopic photographic images from the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.See all of our contributions to the LCDL at http://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/contributing-institution/beaufort-county-library.