Although a number of memoirs from Civil War surgeons have been published in the last decade, "I Hope to Do My Country Serviceis the first of its kind from a Michigan regimental surgeon to appear in more than a century.

The letters, journals, and newspaper writings of Henry Perkins Goddard (18421916) of Norwich, Connecticut, provide much firsthand detail about the passions and principles of a divided nation during the Civil War and Reconstruction as witnessed by a scrupulous soldier and scribe eager to capture the bitter realities of his time. The Good Fight That Didnt End includes Goddards accounts of combat in the battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, his travels across the war-torn South after the war, and his encounters and friendships with well-known historical and literary figures of the era, including Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, George McClellan, Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, George Armstrong Custer, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain. In his friendships with prominent former Confederates and high-ranking officials in both the North and the South, Goddard places himself at a nexus of efforts toward national reconciliation, carefully recording the temper of the changing times.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1866.