Edward B Dalton Research Paper

Edward Barry Dalton is the only member of the regiment to have been the subject of a previously published work. A short biography including a selection of the surgeon’s wartime official correspondence entitled Memorial of Edward B. Dalton M.D. was complied and published as a tribute by his brother John Call Dalton shortly after his death in 1872. (John Call Dalton, Memorial of Edward B. Dalton)

A few weeks after Fair Oaks, Dalton like many other soldiers in the Army of the Potomac would contract malaria during the time spent in the swampy environs along the flooded Chickahominy in the late spring and early summer of 1862. The fever would nearly kill him, but he would recover and return to active service. He would move from role to role, serving as Medical Inspector for the Army of Potomac during Grant’s Overland Campaign of 1864, as the Chief Medical Officer of depot hospitals at City Point and Alexandria among others when not with the army in the field, and as the Medical Director of 9th Corps during the last months of the Siege of Petersburg. He would resign from the army five days after Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox and in 1866 would be appointed Superintendent of the newly formed Metropolitan Board of Health with the mission to prevent the spread of disease in New York City and the surrounding area. This was a difficult assignment and deadly illness would invade his own household killing his infant daughter in 1868 and beloved wife in 1869. The doctor himself was haunted with attacks of the malaria which had followed him

The grounds of the academy were turned into an army hospital. Many of the patients in the hospital would never leave Annapolis and are buried in Annapolis National