Francis Porcher, valedictorian of his 1847 graduating class at the Medical College of the State of South Carolina and well-respected writer of several works on the medicinal properties of plants, was the ideal person for Confederate Surgeon General Samuel Moore to assign the important project of preparing a treatise on the indigenous plants of the South for the Army. Porcher was born and educated in South Carolina. After his graduation from medical school, he continued his education in Paris and Florence, and returned to this country in 1849. During the next few years, he published several works on the subjects of botanicals and medicine, maintained a private practice, co-founded the Charleston Preparatory Medical School in 1852, and traveled again to Europe, visiting many hospitals along the way. Later in the 1850s, he became professor of clinical medicine and materia medica and therapeutics at his alma mater. He was an editor of the “Charleston Medical Journal and Review” for five years and an attending physician at the Marine Hospital in Charleston. Despite all his pre-war responsibilities, Porcher joined the Confederate Army at the war’s start, and remained in military service until the end (Atkinson 58; Kelly & Burrage 975; Rutkow, Resources of the Southern Field, v-vii).

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