Reed B. Bontecou, M.D. and Civil War Surgical Photography

Excerpted from: civilwarmed.blogspot.com

Reed Bontecou was born April 22, 1824, in Troy, New York. During his schooling, he demonstrated an exceptional aptitude for the natural sciences. His work was so expertly done that he was often entrusted with the teaching of botany and zoology, even though a student himself.

In 1842, Bontecou began the study of medicine under the tutelage of several prominent Troy physicians and surgeons, and from 1844 to 1845, he attended lectures at the Medical Department of the University of the City of New York. He finished his studies in Vermont at Castleton Medical College, receiving his M.D. in 1847.

When the Civil War broke out, Bontecou was commissioned a surgeon with one of the Union infantry regiments supplied by the Troy area, and performed his first field operations after the Battle of Big Bethel in June 1861. He was present at the famous battle between the Monitor and the Virginia, the capture of Yorktown, and was placed in charge of hospitals at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, and Beaufort, South Carolina.

In late 1863, Bontecou was ordered to Washington, DC, to take charge of the Harewood General Hospital, and was on duty there until it was disbanded in 1866. It was during his tenure at Harewood that he made his most important contribution: he is credited with being the largest contributor to the Army Medical Museum. The thousands of specimens and hundreds of photographs that Bontecou contributed became a major foundation of the museum, which subsequently developed into the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM), in Washington, DC.

Bontecou’s photographs, however, had a more immediate impact than the museum’s mission. Dr. Rogers credits him with being the first to apply photography for clinical purposes, showing the condition of the wounded when the soldiers were first admitted to the hospital, and many times when they were discharged. Indeed, the photographs were invaluable in qualifying disabled veterans for pension payments.

Read More

Reed B. Bontecou, M.D.--His Role in Civil War Surgery and Medical Photography

From: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

(ABSTRACT) This article on the subject of Civil War injuries and their surgical repair is devoted to Reed B. Bontecou, M.D., a New York surgeon who contributed greatly to the use of photography to document the casualties of the battlefield as seen in the Northern as well as the Southern states. Photographs of the wounded soldiers helped to verify the severity of their injuries, and helped to determine the degree and amount of the post-war pension payments. These photographs were one of the largest sources which were used in the creation of the Otis Archives of the present-day National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. Some of the wounded soldiers' photographs in the Otis Archives demonstrate the use of plastic surgery techniques to repair the wounded face, head and neck, torso, and the extremities by only a handful of Northern and Confederate surgeons including Gurdon Buck, J.S. Gouley and Henry B. Sands of New York City; H. Culbertson, U.S.V. of Madison, Wisconsin; J. Cooper McKee of Washington, D.C., W.W. Keen, Jr. of Philadelphia; and C.B. Gibson, P.A.C.S. of Richmond; S.H. Stout of Tennessee; and J.B. Bean, a dentist of Chattanooga.

Read More

A Hospital Steward is Promoted

By Larry Shockley

In the past I have been lucky enough to help out the fine folks at the West Virginia Archives and History and your theme here reminded me of a document that I digitized for them awhile back. This is a digital copy of a letter promoting a soldier, John Cooper, from Hospital Steward of the 7th (West) Virginia Volunteer Infantry, to Commissioned Assistant Surgeon of the same unit. It is authored by Lieut. Francis W.H. Baldwin and addressed to West Virginia's first Governor, A.I. Boreman. Surgeons were in high demand in the "Bloody Seventh" as they supposedly fought in more battles and had more losses than any other WV Regiment during the Civil War. The original can be found at the West Virginia Archives and History.

Read More

George Henry Bosley, Medical Cadet

From:westpointcadet.webs.com
George Henry Bosley, a son of Daniel and Lucia R. Bosley, was born on October 31, 1841, in Lakeville, Livingston County, New York. He enlisted at age 20 on November 23, 1861, as a private in Co. K of the 13th New York Volunteer Infantry. That regiment was raised primarily in Rochester, but Bosley enrolled in Washington, D.C. Although he enlisted to serve the term of the regiment, he was never mustered in. On January 31, 1862, he was discharged for disability. On April 3, 1862, Bosley began a two-year study of medicine, apparently in Michigan. About a month before he finished the course, on March 7, 1864, he wrote to Surgeon General William A. Hammond from Ann Arbor, seeking an appointment as a medical cadet. he stated that he was a resident of Rochester, New York, and 22 years of age. As required, he enclosed a certificate from the dean of the college attesting that he had attended a full course of lectures, and a doctor's certificate as to his character and physical condition. On April 18 an army medical board in New York City examined Bosley and pronounced him qualified to serve as a medical cadet. On May 2 he was appointed as such. Bosley served from May 17, 1864, to the end of that month at DeCamp General Hospital on David's Island in New York Harbor. he was then transferred to Cumberland General Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, beginning his duties there on June 11. On October 1, 1864, he requested a transfer to the east so he could attend another course of medical lectures and graduate, "thereby becoming better qualified to care for my patients," he explained, "and also that I may be enabled to take higher rank in the Medical Dept. of the Army, which is now debarred me by reason of not being a graduate." In response the authorities transferred him to a general hospital in Albany, New York, where he arrived on November 1, 1864, and completed his career as a medical cadet. Bosley was discharged on January 3, 1865, to accept a position as assistant surgeon of the 154th New York Volunteer infantry, then occupying Savannah, Georgia, as part of Major General William T. Sherman's army. His commission as such was dated December 27, 1864. Bosley reported for duty with the regiment on the rainy day of January 19. Although other outsiders who were commissioned as officers in the 154th received a hostile reception from the regiment's veterans, Bosley appears to have been accepted. When 27 officers of the regiment contributed cartes de visite for the making of a souvenir montage at the end of the war, Bosley was included with the veterans. Eight days after he arrived in Savannah the regiment left the city for the Carolinas campaign. Assistant Surgeon Bosley served with the regimental hospital until March 31, 1865, when orders issued near Goldsboro, North Carolina, detailed him for duty in the second Division, XX Corps hospital. At the close of the war he was mustered out with the 154th on june 11, 1865, near Bladensburg, Maryland. In the postwar years Bosley graduated from the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons and practiced in New York City. he organized and directed the Relapsing Fever Hospital on Hart's Island and was connected with the "outdoor department" of Bellevue Hospital for a dozen years. "Dr. Bosley displayed unusual ability in diagnosis," the New York Times stated in his obituary, "and was the author of several articles in the New-York Medical Journal which attracted much attention from members of his profession." Bosley was a member of the New York Medical Society. One of his colleages was Dr. Millard Fleming, former surgeon of Bosley's old regiment, the 13th New York. Both men were active Masons (Bosley's ornate Masonic Knights Templar sword and scabbard was auctioned on eBay in April 2003). Bosley died suddenly of heart failure on the morning of December 3, 1892, at his home at 152 West 74th Street in New York. he was 51 years old. he left a wife. The whereabouts of his Civil War effects is unknown.

Read More

Surviving a Musket Ball Wound

From: collectmedicalantiques.com

Cpt. “S” of the 29th New York volunteers was wounded by a musket ball on May 2, 1863 at Chancellorsville. With his lung collapsed, he walked 1 1/2 miles to a field hospital where physicians unsuccessfully attempted to reduce the hernea, which contained lung and “some portion of the alimentary canal.” The following day, hostilities forced Cpt S to be evacuated and he subsequently had to walk another 1 1/2 miles. The musket ball passed in his stool on May 7th, and the wound, which contained lung and stomach, eventually granulated in.

Read More

The Struggle to Educate Black Deaf Schoolchildren in Washington, D.C

.By Sandra Jowers-Barber

African American deaf children of school age in the District of Columbia began that struggle after an early, but brief, promise of educational integration. The Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and Blind was established by Amos Kendall in the district in 1856.A year later, it was incorporated by an act of Congress.

On February 16,1857, Kendall secured the passage of another act that granted an allowance of one hundred and fifty dollars a year for the maintenance and tuition of each child received in the institution from the district.
That same year Kendall offered Edward Miner Gallaudet, by letter,the position of superintendent of the Columbia Institution.

Gallaudet’s background was above reproach. His father, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, co-founded the first American school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. His deaf mother, Sophia, was one of his father’s first students. Gallaudet and his mother came to Washington together. She took the position of housemother to the students.When the school opened, an estimated twenty deaf and ten blind students were expected from the district and an unknown number from Maryland.

Among the students that Gallaudet was preparing to direct were a few who were Black. This was an unusual situation for this period. Before the Civil War, Black people, both deaf and hearing, struggled to obtain a formal education. Because it was a criminal offense in some states to educate enslaved people, those enslaved persons who learned to read, like Frederick Douglass, concealed that fact. However,the pre–Civil War Columbia Institution accepted Black students, but their numbers were always small. Many came because of the intervention of wealthy white patrons. Gallaudet received numerous requests for assistance and generally responded positively to them by accepting the youth at the Kendall School. Gallaudet clearly saw the school’s mission as providing education for all deaf students when he initially accepted both races. He noted in the "History of the College for the Deaf" that there had been “colored pupils since the early days of the school.”

Although Black and white students had separate sleeping and eating accommodations, all of them were taught together in the classroom.

Excerpted from: academia.edu

IMAGE: Edward Miner Gallaudet

Read More

Deaf Soldiers in the Civil War

From: deafdigest.net

- John Gross Barnard  fought for the Union, was hard of hearing, but was able to graduate from West Point.

- William Meade Berkeley fought for the Confederates, was wounded in action.

- John Blount fought for the Union, graduated from Kentucky School for the Deaf and became a teacher at the same school.

- William Martin Chamberlain fought for the Union, hid his deafness and fought for a while before his deafness was discovered and he was discharged.

- Hartwell Macon Chamberlayne fought for the Confederates at the Battle of Newmarket, he ran into James Jennings (see below) who was a prisoner of war.

- Henry Clay English fought for the Confederates, taught at schools for the deaf before fighting in the war; when war ended he went back to his teaching career.

- G.E.Fischer fought for the Union, served on the Union ships during the war.

- James Goodloe George fought for the Union, was a career teacher, like English (see above).

- James Jennings fought for the Union, as a prisoner of war, made acquaintance with a rival solder (Chamberlayne, see above). They both knew each other from way back before the war broke out.

- Robert Heber King fought for the Confederates, cultivated the contacts of higher ranked officers, which helped him in his post war careers in various positions.

- James H. McFarland fought for the Confederates, role in the war was to carry dispatches between Confederate troops positioned away from each other on the field.

- Benedict Oppenheimer fought for the Confederates, was a rarity; one of the few Confederate solders of Jewish faith; was the one that fired the cannons, since noise did not bother him!

- William Simpson fought for the Union, was able to hide his deafness throughout the war.

-  John H. Yeager fought for the Union, graduated from the Kentucky School for the Deaf.

IMAGE: Kentucky School for the Deaf

Read More

Veterans Health Administration

The first Federal agency to provide medical care to veterans was the Naval Home in Philadelphia, PA. The home was created in 1812 and was followed by the creation of Soldiers Home in 1853 and St. Elizabeth's Hospital in 1855. Congress created the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in 1865 in response to the high number of Civil War casualties. These homes were initially intended to be room and board for disabled veterans. However, by the late 1920s, the homes were providing a level of care comparable to hospital care.

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is the component of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) led by the Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Health that implements the medical assistance program of the VA through the administration and operation of numerous VA medical centers (VAMC), Outpatient Clinics (OPC), Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOC), and VA Community Living Centers (VA Nursing Home) Programs.

The VHA is distinct from the U.S. Department of Defense Military Health System of which it is not a part.

The VHA division has more employees than all other elements of the VA combined.

From: wikipedia.org

IMAGE: Soldiers Home, Philadelphia

Read More