Lincoln General Hospital, Washington, D.C.

From: collections.countway.harvard.edu Birds eye view of Lincoln General Hospital, Washington, D.C., seen from the rear, 1865. From Reports on the extent and nature of the materials available for the preparation of a medical and surgical history of the rebellion (Philadelphia, 1865). The Lincoln General Hospital, a pavilion-type hospital, was active from December, 1862, until August, 1865, and located about a mile from the Capitol building in Washington.  Over 21,000 troops and prisoners were admitted over the course of the wa...

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The Confederacy and Coca-Cola

By Michael Climo, 6-28-14 Most everyone recognizes the soft drink Coca-Cola as one of the most prominent brands known today. But, did you know that the discovery of Coca-Cola was made by a former Confederate soldier and was unintentional? Initially it was formulated as a tonic to cure almost everything. But today Dr. John Stith Pemberton’s creation has since become one of world's most iconic and profitable brands. John Stith Pemberton was born on January 8, 1831 in the small town of Knoxville, Georgia near Macon. At an early age his family moved to Rome where he was raised and attended school. His father, James Clifford Pemberton, was a native...

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List of Drugs Carried in a Civil War Medical Wagon

From: medicalantiques.com The following list of drugs would have been carried in a Civil War medical wagon per the Medical Department regulations and Appendix A of the Supply list. List of Drugs carried in a Civil War Medical Wagon (See the 1861 Revised Army Supply Table list of drugs for field and hospital, which is in Latin, as are the labels for the various containers.) acetate lead alcohol alcoholic extract of belladonna alum aromatic spirit of ammonia aromatic sulphuric acid bicarbonate potassa bicarbonate soda blistering cerate blue mass calomel camphor carbonate ammonia castor oil cerate of cantharides chlorate of potassa chlorate...

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Medical Schools in Existence Prior to and During the Civil War

(The following are the personal edited research notes of Michael Echols, the source of which may or may not be completely documented) The following list of medical schools were in existence prior to the Civil War and graduated doctors who ‘may’ have been the right age to have served in the Civil War as a surgeon.  There are contract surgeons (irregulars) and Union surgeons in the Army (regulars), either of which could have served in the Civil War.  Most surgeons in the War were trained during the 1840’s and 50’s.  The value of this information is that it serves to help document if a given doctor, surgeon, or officer, in fact...

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Navy Medicine in the Civil War

From: med.navy.mil NAVY MEDICAL CARE Whether victims of disease or hostile action, Sailors required treatment and much Navy medicine took place at hospitals in Chelsea, Brooklyn, Mound City, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. By the fall of 1862, Navy hospitals were filled to their utmost capacity. As a result, medical facilities at navy yards and naval stations were expanded and both civilian and Army hospitals were also treating naval patients. To remedy the situation, a major hospital expansion campaign began. Unfortunately, many of these improvements weren’t realized until the very end of the war. EXPANSION OF NAVY MEDICINE Following their...

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Mary Ashton Rice Livermore (1820-1905): My Story of the War

From: uab.edu "My story of the war: a woman’s narrative of four years personal experience as nurse in the Union Army…" Hartford, Conn.:   A. D. Worthington and Company, 1888. "The story of my life: or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years…" Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington and Company, 1898. Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, a native of Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the most well-known female figures in the Union relief movement. Before the Civil War broke out, Mary had already devoted her life to social, humanitarian and charitable causes. In her early twenties, she worked as a family tutor on a large rural Virginia plantation....

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Clara Barton (1821-1912)

From: uab.edu In her hometown of Oxford, Massachusetts, Clara Barton began serving humanity early in life when she set up a school for the children of her father’s sawmill workers in 1836. She was only fifteen years of age (Library of North American Biographies). Departing from this position in 1851 to enhance her education, Barton attended school at the Liberal Institute of Clinton, NY for one year. Thereafter, she found herself teaching again in Bordentown, NJ from 1852 to 1854. Clara’s school in Bordentown was one of New Jersey’s first free, public schools, and its great success and growth in such a short period of time caused the local...

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The Beginnings of Modern Medical Attitudes

From: Research notes of Dr. Michael  Echols A typical physician of 1820 was likely to a regard a seventeenth century medical text as of clinical importance; but a typical physician of 1880 was very unlikely to so regard it. Inspired by the incredible success of antisepsis and anesthesia in surgery, and by the leap in medical and surgical knowledge which almost always follows a major war, many physicians born between about 1820 and 1845 saw by the 1870s little practical need to preserve the pre-antisepsis, pre-anesthesia literature, let alone enshrine it, in institutional libraries. To be sure, they did not neglect reading in the furtherance...

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Civil War Subsistence Department

From: illinois.gov In 1775 the Continental Congress created a Commissary General of Stores and Provisions used to provision the Continental Army; however, few funds were allocated to feed the army. Therefore, in 1818 Congress reorganized the Quartermaster Department and provided for a Subsistence Department under a Commissary General of Subsistence. Responsible for provisioning the Army, the Subsistence Department controlled the procurement of all rations. When the Civil War broke out there was a staff of twelve, four of whom left to join the Confederacy. Joseph P. Taylor headed the Department for most of the war. As Commissary General,...

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U.S. Navy: Diseases of the Civil War

From: med.navy.mil Even though sanitary conditions aboard ship were often superior to those ashore, and both navies probably fared better than the armies when it came to the frequency of disease, rheumatism and scurvy kept the doctors busy along with typhoid, dysentery, break bone fever, hemorrhoids, and damage done by knuckles. In the southern climes, insect-borne malaria and yellow fever laid low many a crew. And, regardless of what they had to work with, surgeons aboard the ironclads, and indeed every vessel, had no medicine for the ills of the spirit brought on by the strain of monotony, poor food, and unhealthy living conditions which...

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Dr. Mary Walker, Surgeon

By Mercedes Graf Dr. Mary Edwards Walker is the sole woman to have been awarded the Medal of Honor. That she received this prestigious award at a time when women’s roles were strictly circumscribed makes her especially significant. Walker, born in Syracuse, NY, to “free thinking” abolitionist parents, graduated from medical school in 1855 at age 23, when only a handful of women in the country were qualified medical doctors. When the Civil War started in 1861, Walker traveled to Washington, DC, to offer her services as a physician to the Army. Hospital commanders, however, were not ready to accept a female physician on staff. Unable to find...

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Eleven-Year-Old Wins the Medal of Honor

By W.W. Minsinger, M.D., Vermont June 25, 1862. With the Peninsula Campaign in full swing, McClellan's Army of the Potomac was just miles from Richmond. Between June 25 and July 1, Lee went on the offensive, attacking McClellan repeatedly in a series of battles known as the "Seven Days." In the Seven Days Battles the conduct of Willie Johnston, a drummer boy from St. Johnsbury, made him the youngest recipient of the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor, which had only recently been created. Willie was eleven years old. Each day Robert E. Lee's forces attacked General George McClellan's troops, and every night McClellan had...

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A Mystery in Manuscripts

By James Labosier, 9-25-14 Among the History of Medicine’s manuscript collections rests a small group of letters and diaries from Army Surgeon Jonathan Letterman. However, these papers, donated to the Library in 1924 by Dr. Joseph T. Smith, Jr., a Baltimore physician and Letterman’s nephew, include two diaries which Letterman did not write. There is some tantalizing evidence in the historical record which places Letterman in the proximity of the activities documented in the diaries and he almost certainly personally knew some of the persons who traveled with the diaries’ author. How they made their way into this set of documents and who actually...

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More on Lincoln's Autopsy

From: medicalmuseum.mil "A little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger" Dr. Edward Curtis On April 15, 1865 at 12:10 p.m., the autopsy of President Lincoln took place in the Guest Room at the northeast corner of the second floor of the White House (currently the President's Dining Room). Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes and Dr. Robert Stone presided, while Dr. Joseph Janvier Woodward and Dr. Edward Curtis performed the autopsy. The interpretation of the injury and care provided for President Lincoln are best told by those who were present. Dr. Joseph Janvier Woodward's official autopsy report: Surgeon General's Office Washington...

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Walt Whitman's Soldiers: Death of a Pennsylvania Soldier

From: medicalmuseum.mil Frank H. Irwin, company E, 93d Pennsylvania—died May I, ’65—My letter to his mother. — DEAR MADAM: No doubt you and Frank’s friends have heard the sad fact of his death in hospital here, through his uncle, or the lady from Baltimore, who took his things. (I have not seen them, only heard of them visiting Frank.) I will write you a few lines—as a casual friend that sat by his death-bed. Your son, corporal Frank H. Irwin, was wounded near fort Fisher, Virginia, March 25th, 1865—the wound was in the left knee, pretty bad. He was sent up to Washington, was receiv’d in ward C, Armory-square hospital, March 28th—the wound...

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The Empty Sleeve: or, the Life and Hardships of Henry H. Meacham, in the Union Army

From: collections.countway.harvard.edu This pamphlet is an example of postwar mendicant literature—items printed and sold for the support of their authors—and illustrate some of the hardships faced by disabled veterans in later life. Henry H. Meacham, a former carriage-maker in Massachusetts, joined the 32nd Massachusetts Volunteers; his arm was blown off by a shell near Petersburg in June, 1864.  He printed and sold this pamphlet to make a living for himself and his ailing wife.  In this account of his war experiences, Meacham says, "As we were standing there, a shell came through one man and then exploded, taking my right arm...

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To Kill and To Heal: North vs. South

Excerpted from: illinois.gov Despite their sharp philosophical and moral divisions over the expansion of slavery and the election of Abraham Lincoln, Northerners and Southerners actually shared some common practical background as the Civil War approached. Both sides had similar weapons and military training, as well as medical knowledge and education. They also shared a lack of preparedness for a long and costly war. Although more than 620,000 soldiers died during the Civil War, countless others were sick and wounded, yet survived. Providing appropriate medical care was a complex challenge for both sides. While both the North and the South...

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The Medical Library Movement

From: medicalantiques.com Not until the 1890s did American medical schools realize that their own well stocked and well maintained medical libraries would be essential components of the rapid modernizing of medical pedagogy which had begun in the 1870s with the shift from proprietary schools to graded instruction. The lack of attention to medical libraries which had been the prevailing attitude not only in medical schools but throughout the entire medical community gradually evolved into a "medical library movement," a unity of the aims of both the "Old Guard" and the younger physicians in a third generation of physicians who saw the need...

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Bristol Civil War Hospital Finally Gets Honored

By Tom Netherland, 4-27-14 BRISTOL, Tenn. — Long dead soldiers of the Civil War and the Bristol-based Confederate hospital wherein many received care and also died warrant acknowledgement. So goes the sentiment among the Bristol-based Sons of Confederate Veterans James Keeling Camp 52. “It’s preserving the history and the history of Bristol,” said James Booher of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Therefore on Saturday afternoon members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans dedicated an historical marker in downtown Bristol to recognize the Confederate Hospital. They initially sought partial funding from the state of Tennessee, yet were rebuffed,...

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