After The Guns Fall Silent

When the guns stop firing, the dying doesn’t end.

In this episode, we follow the story of a wounded Union lieutenant left to perish on the field at Second Bull Run. He is abandoned not by fate, but by a broken system. That single tragedy may have become the turning point for a quiet, analytical surgeon named Jonathan Letterman.

From the coal-smoked streets of Pennsylvania to the cholera-ridden wards of Philadelphia, Letterman grows into the one mind capable of diagnosing the Army itself. And on the battlefields of Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, he builds the first true American trauma system, a blueprint that will shape EMS for the next 160 years.

This is the story of how one man changed the fate of the wounded… long after the guns fell silent.