Discharged Emaciated from Libby Prison

By Kayla, 11-11-11 “He then looked very sick, pale, and emaciated. He was hardly able to get about. He was afflicted chronic diarrhea, and complained of severe griping pain in his stomach.”  That’s how Patrick Creen described James H. Phalan when he saw him working at the Washington Navy Yard. Phalan was among the Union soldiers imprisoned in the harsh, unsanitary and overcrowded conditions at Libby Prison during the Civil War.  After his release in 1863, he lived with his Aunt Hannah Griffin and his wife Hanora, and he tried to work at the Navy Yard.  His aunt said, “He tried to do a little easy work in the Navy Yard...

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Chisolm’s Manual of Military Surgery

From: waring.library.musc.edu “In putting forth this Manual of Military Surgery for the use of Surgeons in the Confederate service, I have been led by the desire to mitigate, if possible, the horrors of war, as seen in its most frightful phase in military hospitals.” Julian J. Chisolm Preface to First Edition. “When the war suddenly broke upon us, followed immediately by the blockading of our ports, all communication was cut off with Europe, which was the expected source of our surgical information. As there had been no previous demand for works on military surgery, there were none to be had in the country, and our physicians were compelled...

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Sister-Nurses Honored for Military Service

From: cscsisters.org Memorial Day, observed this year on May 28, commemorates all the men and women who have died in military service for the United States. Flags traditionally fly at half-mast from dawn until noon, and volunteers often will place an American flag on the graves of veterans. At Saint Mary’s in Notre Dame, Indiana, we remember our deceased sisters who served as nurses in the military. This military service actually began in 1861, six months after the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, when Holy Cross sisters responded to the request of Indiana Governor Oliver Morton to care for Indiana soldiers then serving in Kentucky. Although...

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“I Cannot Leave Them”: Walt Whitman

By Karen, 2-17-14 Walt Whitman was 43 and already a well-known poet in 1862 when word reached his family that his brother George, who’d enlisted in the Union army, had been wounded in a battle at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Whitman immediately left to find George, anxious to see him and discover the extent of his injuries. George, as it turned out, had only received a cheek wound, but Whitman’s experience searching for his brother among the military hospitals had left an impression on him. For the next three years—the remainder of the war and then some—Whitman, who moved to Washington DC for this purpose, visited wounded and sick soldiers almost...

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A Case of Temporary Insanity

By Karen, 2-25-13 Daniel Sickles, although perhaps best known as a political Civil War general whose disobedience at Gettysburg got his troops killed, is also known for a scandal before the war in which he killed his wife’s lover. Sickles was a former lawyer of the Tammany Hall political machine who had become a Democratic representative for New York in the House of Representatives. Sickles was a womanizer and had many affairs, most famously with courtesan Fanny White, whom he took with him on his travels to England. At age 33 he courted scandal by marrying Teresa Bagioli—who was 15 and pregnant. In 1859, when his wife was 23, Sickles...

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Part I: "The Lady Nurse of Ward E" watches the Civil War come to Washington, D.C.

By Diane Wendt, 7-31-14 With Confederate troops looming just outside of Washington, D.C., July 1864 was an exciting and scary time to be a nurse in the city. Curator Diane Wendt shares what those daring days were like 150 years ago through the matter-of-fact diary entries of nurse Amanda Akin. While nurse Amanda Akin's diary is more cursory than poetic, I was drawn to her account because of the proximity of her hospital to the Smithsonian, and because we share, albeit 150 years apart, this common ground. Her original diary is in the collections of the National Library of Medicine and was the centerpiece of a small exhibition I curated a few...

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Part II: "The Lady Nurse of Ward E" Bids Adieu to Washington, D.C.

By Diane Wendt, 7-31-2014 This post continues the story of Civil War nurse Amanda Akin, which began in Part I. "July 12, 1864. The bridge over Gunpowder River, sixteen miles from Baltimore toward Philadelphia was burned. The 7.30 A.M. train yesterday was attacked, the passengers ordered out, and the train then run on to the bridge and burned. This afternoon the "extras" say a few miles of double track between this city and Baltimore were torn up, so I am a fixture for the present. […]" General Jubal Early sent one unit of his Confederate forces around Baltimore to cut supply and communication lines that connected the Capitol to the North....

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Intersections of Religion and War: Examining a USCC Diary

By Savannah Labbe 9-26-16 While most don’t immediately associate religion with war, there is no doubt that it plays a role in most, the Civil War included. The Civil War brought with it new levels of death and destruction that the government was unprepared to deal with; it didn’t have the resources to adequately care for the influx of wounded soldiers, which was painfully evident after Bull Run when the number of soldiers needing medical care was more than the hospitals could handle. In the wake of the Battle of First Bull Run, the general public as well as the government saw the need for a civilian organization to help care for and comfort...

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Julian John Chisolm: Class of 1850

From: waring.library.musc.edu Julian John Chisolm was born in Charleston, SC, on April 16, 1830. He graduated from the Medical College of the State of South Carolina in March 1850 and went on to spend two years studying, with an emphasis on eye surgery, at various hospitals in Paris. Returning to Charleston in 1852, Chisolm began a private practice and was very involved in the local medical community. In 1857 he was part of a group that founded the Charleston Preparatory Medical School, and with Joseph Palmer Cain established a free hospital for slaves. He became professor of surgery at the MCSSC in 1858 but returned to Europe in 1859 to visit...

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Grave’s Anatomy: Abolitionists, Body Snatchers, and the Demise of Winchester Medical College

By Kaylyn Sawyer ’17 GRAVE, n.  A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student. A census in 1890 listed Chris Baker’s occupation as “Anatomical Man.” While the title sounds like that one of today’s superheroes, the nineteenth century existence of this vocation kept people from lingering around medical colleges after dark. By day, Chris Baker worked as a janitor for the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. By night, he had the darker task of obtaining corpses for the school. He was a “resurrectionist,” and he was not alone in his eerie nocturnal task of preying on the powerless and recently interred...

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History of Surgical Treatment of Appendicitis (Article in Serbian)

By Meljnikov I1, Radojcić B, Grebeldinger S, Radojcić N. Abstract Most of the history of appendicitis and appendectomy has been made during the past two centuries. Jacopo Berengario da Carpi gave the first description of this structure in 1522. Gabriele Fallopio, in 1561, appears to have been the first writer to compare the appendix to a worm.  In1579 Caspar Bauhin proposed the ingenious theory that the appendix served in intrauterine life as a receptacle for the faexes. Many of anatomists added more or less insignificant ideas concerning the structure of the appendix and entered upon useless controversy concerning the name,...

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The Ladies Union Aid Society of St. Louis (LUAS)

From: civilwartalk.com We often see photographs of women who were serving with the U. S. Sanitary Commission in the East. Jessie Fremont was the wife of General John C. Fremont and daughter of prominent Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton. She urged her husband to set up a separate Western Sanitary Commission in St. Louis to serve the Trans-Mississippi region. Gen. Fremont issued an order that established the Western Sanitary Commission in St. Louis, Order No. 159. A primary purpose was to provide doctors and nurses for the hospitals in the fight in the West. It opened or supplied some 15 hospitals in St. Louis as well as hospital ships and...

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Civil War Helped Shape Today's Medical Practices

By Carolyn Kimmel for Body & Mind Magazine, 11-13-12 The words "butcher" and "barbaric" may often be used to describe medical practices during the Civil War, but today's soldiers owe a lot to the forefathers who tended to the sick and wounded in Gettysburg and elsewhere. "There were definitely medical advances that came out of the Civil War that are benefiting soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan today," said Peter J. D'Onofrio, president of the Society of Civil War Surgeons, based in Ohio. "When I give talks, I say 'if you get nothing else out of tonight's talk, remember we can't look back at the surgeons of the Civil War and judge them...

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Confederate Medical Department

From: waring.library.musc.edu Officially, 257 South Carolinians served in the Confederate Medical Department though most of these doctors were general practitioners with no real experience performing surgery, treating large numbers of wounded at a time, or providing for field sanitation. Combat was less often a cause of death than disease. By some accounts soldiers were incapacitated from illness an average of six times during the course of their military service. Many enlisted men came from rural areas where they had not been exposed to or developed immunities to communicable diseases like measles, tuberculosis, malaria or yellow fever. Additionally,...

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The Hospital of the Sisters of Charity

From: beckerexhibits.wustl.edu In the late fall of 1828, four members of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent De Paul traveled the 1,500 miles from their convent in Emmitsburg, Maryland to St. Louis, Missouri, to found the first hospital west of the Mississippi River and the first Catholic hospital in the United States. The American branch of the Daughters of Charity was founded by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and stemmed from the religious order founded by St. Vincent De Paul in 1633 in France. The “Sisters Hospital” was opened in a three-room log cabin, a building that had been donated by St. Louis cotton merchant John Mullanphy. By 1832,...

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Under the Knife

By Terry L. Jones, 11-17-12 On Aug. 28, 1862, Maj. Gen. Richard S. Ewell’s Confederate division was fighting desperately in the fields and pine thickets near Groveton, Va., during the Second Bull Run campaign. Heavy fire was coming from unidentified soldiers in a thicket 100 yards in front. To get a better look, Ewell knelt on his left knee to peer under the limbs. Suddenly a 500-grain (about 1.1 ounces) lead Minié ball skimmed the ground and struck him on the left kneecap. Some nearby Alabama soldiers lay down their muskets and hurried over to carry him from the field, but the fiery Ewell barked: “Put me down, and give them hell! I’m no better...

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Civil War Surgeries: The Truth Behind the Myth

By Karen, 3-3-14 You may have seen it in a film or read it in a book: a bloody Civil War surgery consisting of an incompetent surgeon, overeager to amputate, chopping off limbs unnecessarily and without anesthesia in a chaotic hospital tent. However, despite its prevalence, this traditional view of Civil War surgeries is mostly myth. Myth 1: Surgeons amputated unnecessarily and too often. The Civil War occurred before x-rays and antibiotics—and basic antiseptics, while used, were not used uniformly due to a lack of understanding of germs. As a result, infection was a deadly problem for the wounded, more deadly in fact than amputation. So...

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