Ramsey County History – Fall 1970: “Smallpox, Malaria—W.R. Brown’s Civil War Diary: The War Within A War”

Smallpox, Malaria—W.R. Brown’s Civil War Diary: The War Within A War
Authors: Virginia Brainard Kunz and James O. Wall

W. R. Brown enlisted in the Sixth Minnesota Infantry in 1862 at the age of 46. He served mostly in hospitals, in the field, at Fort Snelling, and in Helena, Arkansas. He kept a diary in which he wrote “not of battles but of the struggle to survive disease.” The many diary entries printed here dealt with daily camp life, weather, the standard medicines of the time, smallpox, his railroad trip to Arkansas, the attitudes and conditions of the people of the South, his own bout with typhoid fever and, probably, malaria.
PDF of Kunz & Wall article