I recently completed this book (
Revolutionary Surgeons: Patriots and Loyalists on the Cutting Edge), and found it interesting. It's written by Dr. Per-Olof Hasselgren. He's not a historian, but he's a long-time professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School.
The book is actually 10 chapters about surgeons from the period of the American Revolution. Some of them were patriots, and some of them were loyalists, and one or two of them switched sides before or during the Revolutionary War.
I thought the book was at its best when it gave specific details about how surgery was conducted during the American Revolution, and about the various struggles the surgeons suffered. In fact, I would have preferred if that was the central focus of the book.
The weakness of using chapters to discuss specific surgeons (all aspects of their lives), is that three of the surgeons (Joseph Warren, Benjamin Rush, and Benjamin Church) have been the subject of serious biographies in the past 10-15 years (all of which I've read), so there wasn't a lot in those chapters that I didn't know.
As a surgery professor, the author is on very firm ground when he writes about surgical techniques from that era (and offering small info on how things have evolved since then). As a non-historian, he gets into some trouble when writing about all aspects of the 10 respective doctors with regards to the American Revolution. There are a handful of small mistakes in the book with regards to the Rev War; all pretty minor things that I suspect most readers would not even notice.
It's a relatively quick read, and for those not well versed on the specific surgeons the book focuses on, or on surgical techniques in the American Revolution, I would recommend it.
