Civil War Federal Navy Physicians

Author: John S. Lynch, Msc.

The Federal Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery experienced a substantial loss of officers during 1861. It responded to the loss and the increased demand for its services by augmenting its regular medical officers with volunteer physicians. The medical corps more than doubled in size between 1861 and 1865 as a result of the recruiting efforts. Navy physicians were involved in blockade duty, anticommerce raider cruises, amphibious assaults, riverine duty, and staffing naval facilities ashore. Their services are virtually unknown despite their involvement in most naval activity during the war. This article illuminates their efforts. It does so by analyzing individual service records and reports compiled in the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies during the War of the Rebellion. The Bureau of Medicine and Surgery successfully met the demands made upon it during the American Civil War.

The Federal Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery receives little attention in American Civil War-related publications and discussions. Its medical officers are even more ignored. Answers to basic questions like how the bureau was affected by the war; what was the physician rank structure, how experienced were navy physicians, what was the physician attrition during the war, what assignments were available, what maladies did they treat, and how were they recognized for meritorious service are not readily available. This article attempts to answer these questions by analyzing service records and official war-time naval reports.

The Bureau of Medicine and Surgery Expands

Dr. William Whelan was Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BMS) during the war years.1 He was a senior surgeon, having joined the Navy as an assistant surgeon on January 3, 1828. (He was promoted to surgeon on February 9, 1837.) His physician corps on January 1, 1861 included 61 surgeons, 25 passed assistant surgeons, and 45 assistant surgeons.2 BMS lost 41% of its January 1861 physician complement by the end of the year. A massive recruiting effort soon began, and BMS rapidly grew as a result. Many civilian physicians volunteered and entered the service as acting assistant surgeons. The volunteer physicians comprised 56% of BMS' medical officer strength by 1865.2 The majority of the volunteers either resigned or received honorable discharges soon after the war ended. The strength of the BMS peaked in 1864 with an average of 463 physicians present that year. 

From: medicalantiques.com

Read More

The Dietary Problems of Civil War Soldiers

By T. A. Wheat, from "Medicine in Virginia during the Civil War"

Dietary problems also occurred because soldiers' meals consisted primarily of hard bread and some form of preserved meat. Union troops were consistently issued vegetables to prevent scurvy, now known to be caused by a vitamin C deficiency. The Confederate troops could usually procure similar dietary supplements by foraging or by paying exorbitant prices to camp merchants. This system worked well until the last year of the war when the Virginia countryside was picked bare of foodstuffs. As a result, cases of scurvy increased, as did the mortality rates of Confederate troops who underwent surgery.

The only other well-documented vitamin deficiency was night blindness, which is caused by a deficiency of vitamin A. Nineteenth-century surgeons had no idea what caused night blindness, but one theory held that it was caused by sleeping outdoors with the eyes open and exposed to moonlight (hence the popular term "moon blindness"). At night regiments were sometimes forced to march with the soldiers placing their hands on the shoulder of the person ahead of them because their vision was so impaired.

FROM: encyclopediavirginia.org

.

Read More

A Civil War Pharmaceutical: Turpentine Production in 1800s Alabama

By Catherine Kim Gyllerstrom

The longleaf pine forests that once covered much of Alabama provided ample resources for the establishment and growth of the state's turpentine industry. Between 1840 and 1930, turpentine distilling spanned Baldwin, Mobile, Washington, Choctaw, Escambia, and Tuscaloosa counties. Turpentine was used primarily as a solvent and for fuel, and resin was used in the soap and varnish industries. This industry promoted economic development and industrial expansion, but it also had a history of questionable labor practices, from using enslaved labor to exploiting convicts and immigrants. It was also known as the naval stores industry because pitch, which was used to caulk the seams of wooden sailing ships, was produced from the trees.

Some accounts suggest that turpentine harvesting began as early as 1777 in Mobile County, but significant numbers of operations did not arise in A demonstration of tapping a longleaf pine for 

Alabama until the 1840s, after the widespread adoption of lightweight copper stills. Invented in 1834, these apparatuses reduced the cost of production because they could be set up near the harvesting site. Increased consumer demand for turpentine, pitch, and resin in the 1840s stimulated production. The growing rubber industry employed turpentine as a solvent and the expanding soap and varnish industries required resin for manufacturing. Consumers also purchased turpentine as a cheap alternative to oil for lamps.

In 1847, Col. R. D. James began a small-scale operation in Clarke County that by 1855 yielded 1,060,000 gallons of turpentine and 130,000 barrels of resin per year. Producers were attracted to the southern half of the state because of its largely untouched pine forests. Between 1850 and 1860, Alabama's turpentine industry rapidly expanded, with the annual economic worth increasing 36 times, from $17,800 in 1850 to $642,000 by 1860.

Turpentine collection changed very little from its beginnings in the nineteenth into the early twentieth century. During the turpentine season, which lasted eight months, laborers extracted sap from longleaf pines in a three-step process. Beginning in November, workers entered the woods to begin "boxing" trees. Using long-headed axes, they cut a "box" into the base of the tree, ranging from approximately 10 to 14 inches wide and 2.5 to 3.5 inches deep, to catch the sap from the tree. After boxing was completed by the beginning of March, laborers chipped a "streak" approximately 2/3 of an inch wide and 1 inch deep above the box using a highly specialized tool called a "hack." Chipping occurred weekly for 34 weeks and released the sap, which collected in the box. At the beginning of April, laborers began using a steel spatula to scoop the liquid (a drier, less viscous form of sap known as gum) from the box in a process called "dipping" and then deposited it in buckets. The gum was next transferred to 40-gallon barrels for transport to a distillery or to portable stills near the site. In addition to being labor intensive, this method of gathering the sap eventually killed the tree, with large stands of pines being depleted within a decade and forcing producers to move to new forests.

Through the distillation process, operators transformed the gum into turpentine, pitch, and resin. Once the barrels reached the distillery, laborers transferred the gum to stills. Fires underneath the stills heated the gum and brought the mixture to boil. Vapor then flowed through a tube at the top of the still, where it condensed and dripped into another barrel. This mixture of turpentine and water then separated, and laborers skimmed the turpentine from the surface. This procedure, known as gum turpentining, took between three and a half to five and a half hours and produced both turpentine and resin.

Many of the owners of turpentine operations in Alabama relocated from North Carolina, where forests had already been severely depleted. For example, James R. Grist purchased forestland in Mobile to expand his operation based in Beaufort County, North Carolina. In 1857, his cousin Benjamin Grist opened a turpentine plantation near the Fish River in Mobile County. The Grist venture in Alabama operated with enslaved labor and between 1859 and 1860 produced 26,337 barrels of sap that, after the distillation process, yielded 3,020 barrels of turpentine and 15,118 barrels of resin. Turpentine laborers endured some of the harshest conditions among southern industries. Although the enslaved laborers set the pace for boxing, chipping, and dipping, producers set enormous quotas that required high speed and skill.

During the Civil War, poor market conditions and interrupted transportation temporarily halted naval stores production. However, swift industrialization and the construction of numerous railroads after the war aided the industry's recovery because new rail lines restored access to distilleries and opened up new areas for establishing additional distilleries. L. Keville Larson of Larson and McGowin Inc. 

The industry faced several important changes after the war. The demise of enslaved labor resulted in a shortage of labor, as many freedpeople were unwilling to endure the harsh conditions of the industry. To remedy this situation, operators turned to leasing convicts from Alabama's prison system and to a system known as debt peonage, in which indebted individuals were forced to work until a debt or loan was paid off. Distilleries in Tuscaloosa and Escambia counties leased state inmates to harvest gum in their pine tracts. Famed Alabama outlaw Railroad Bill likely escaped from a turpentining camp. Other distilleries hired northern labor agencies to procure white immigrant labor. These companies lured workers to Alabama with false promises of high wages and favorable working conditions, then essentially held laborers captive while they worked off their transportation costs. In 1902, for example, W. S. Harlan, the manager of Jackson Lumber Company's mill in Lockhart, Covington County, was charged with perpetuating debt peonage and was convicted in 1906. Despite successful prosecution, debt peonage remained a staple of the South's turpentine industry well into the 1920s.

FROM: encyclopediaofalabama.org

IMAGE: Children of turpentine worker near Cordele, Alabama.

Read More

A Taste of Civil War Food

Sampling Jaw-Cracking Hardtack, Hospital Gingerbread and "Idiot's Delight"

By Hoag Levins CAMDEN, N.J. 

The Camden County Historical Society's recent 19th-century food history event certainly brought to mind that famous adage about how an army marches on its stomach. The saying was never truer than during the American Civil War, as huge numbers of soldiers marauded across vast expanses of territory to wage North America's most savage military conflict.

The Food Supply

Through it all, the morale, as well as the physical stamina of each combatant, was directly dependent on what he had to put in his mouth each day. The quartermasters who oversaw the food supply for both the Union and Confederate armies were among those organizations' most important officers because if they failed, the entire army could literally collapse from hunger.

Quartermaster duties were among the military's most complex tasks. Vast tonnages of food and other supplies had to be constantly acquired, secured and moved in a highly organized manner across often-impossible terrain under the most chaotic and harrowing of conditions. The job required particularly talented and driven individuals. For instance, General Ulysses S. Grant, who ultimately led the Union forces to victory, spent much of his earlier military career as a quartermaster rather than an infantry or cavalry leader.

Stark Realities

At the bottom of the logistical chain, gathered around a hundred thousand campfires each day, were the individual soldiers who needed to be fed. In an era before refrigeration or modern food processing techniques, they had to make do with the best fare that could be gotten through to them or on what they could forage from the surrounding landscape.

Although, by today's standards, most of their living and eating conditions were incredibly harsh, many of the baked goods they commonly ate were surprisingly tasty -- a fact learned first hand by those who attended the Camden County Historical Society's recent "Women at the Battle of Gettysburg" presentation.

As part of that Jane Peters Estes event, attendees were invited to try a taste of authentic Civil War food as they listened to the details of the women involved at Gettysburg.

Hunger and Horror

"It all seemed to work together because so much of the story of Gettysburg was about how the soldiers endured both hunger and horror at the same time much of the town's female population was turned into cooks and nurses in the midst of incredible carnage and need," said Historical Society director of programming Sandy Levins. "The idea was to enable the audience to become part of what they were listening to by actually sampling some of what would have brought comfort and sustenance to those Civil War soldiers."

Six Historical Society volunteers researched recipes for period foods and conducted trial baking runs before preparing the food spread across two tables in the rear of the Boyer Auditorium at Society headquarters.

Ms. Levins explained some of the items for the audience:

"Corn meal was an important staple for both armies and soldiers would have eaten corn bread and jonny cake. Our mini-corn muffins today are a nod to that tradition," she said.

Hospital Gingerbread

Gingerbread was also a favorite when it was available, and a comfort food often offered to wounded soldiers in field hospitals. One diary entry of a Civil War nurse described how, after spending the day bathing and bandaging soldiers wounds, she found a sutler's stand and bought a supply of gingerbread which she called "a singular food for sick men."

However, Mrs. Levins pointed out, the conflict's food history "was not all about goodness and light. During the war the four items that caused the most food-related fights within the ranks were bread, meat, apples and pickles. Documents record that soldiers were court martialed, beaten almost to death, and even shot over apples as they went foraging. These were desperate times when large numbers of men often lived just this side of starvation for long periods of time."

The most common -- and likely the most hated -- of all their foods was hardtack, she said. "It was the one thing that every soldier carried in his rucksack. Basically, it was a simple cracker made of flour and water, mixed and rolled to a thickness of about 3/8 of an inch. It was cut into squares and poked with a fork to speed baking time. It's been described by the men as 'indestructible, imperishable, practically inedible, too hard to chew, too small for shoeing mules and too big to use as bullets.'"

One of the best-tasting foods in the afternoon's display was a deep-dish, dark brown float of biscuit-like objects in a thick cinnamon-raisin sauce. The sweet treat was known as "Idiot's Delight," because, Ms. Levins explained, "It was so simple to put together with readily-available materials that it was said 'even an idiot' could make it."

Luxury of Coffee

She also emphasized that the coffee being served that afternoon was an item of great luxury for many of the combatants. "Much like today, the men on both sides of the war loved their coffee. The Union was fortunate to have a steady supply of coffee beans, although they were raw and green and had to be roasted over an open fire without being burnt. Then they were cracked with rifle butts before they could be used for brewing."

"The Confederacy," she said, "was not so lucky. Blockades impeded its flow of equipment and arms as well as food, and its soldiers were forced to make due with things like chicory, burnt corn, peas, potatoes, peanuts and even acorns they would forage in the fall and winter."

Hovering close by the food tables, Historical Society president Richard Pillatt noted "it does seem fitting that as we gather here to contemplate what happened at Gettysburg in 1863, we are also munching on these tooth-cracking plugs of hardtack. As you try to chew this stuff, it really gives you a new appreciation of how difficult even the most minor aspects of daily life must have been for those men and women who sacrificed and suffered so much for the country during those dark days."

The foods for the event were provided by Joyce Albrecht, Dale Chimel, Sandra Forney, Linda Gentry, Charla Lewis, Cheryl McClain and Kathy Witzig.

IMAGE: Coffee shortages were a plague of the Civil War, particularly for Confederate troops. They were often forced to brew chicory, burnt corn, peas, potatoes, peanuts and even acorns instead.

FROM: Historiccamdencounty.com

Read More

African American Medical Pioneer Dr. James McCune Smith (1813-1865)

From: pbs.org

James McCune Smith was the first African American to earn a medical degree and practice medicine in the United States. He was also the first to own and operate a pharmacy, in New York City. Smith was born on April 18, 1813 in New York City to parents who were former slaves. New York's Emancipation Act freed his father and his mother worked her way out of bondage. Smith began his education at the African Free School in New York City, but soon found he could go no further in U.S. education due to racial discrimination.

So Smith crossed the Atlantic and studied instead at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland, where racial prejudice was less oppressive. There, he received a bachelor's degree in 1835, a master's degree in 1836, and his medical degree in 1837.

When he returned to the United States, Smith received a hero's welcome from New York's black community. He told the gathering, "I have striven to obtain education, at every sacrifice and every hazard, and to apply such education to the good of our common country." Soon after that, he gave a speech at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, where he described abolitionist activities in Europe.

He began a medical practice in New York and opened a pharmacy on West Broadway. It is said to be the first African American owned and operated pharmacy in the United States.

Dr. Smith practiced medicine for 25 years, primarily at the Free Negro Orphan Asylum. He frequently gave speeches against slavery, and wrote essays for antislavery publications, including the Emancipator and the Liberator. Smith used science and his knowledge of medicine to refute false claims of slavery advocates. In one essay, he marshaled statistics against a minister's claim that slaves in the South were more content than free blacks in the North. In another, he applied his medical knowledge to counter assertions about black health and insanity.

Smith wrote an introduction for Fredrick Douglass' second autobiographical volume, My Bondage and My Freedom. There, he wrote that Douglass' life story "shows that the worst of our institutions, in its worst aspect, cannot keep down energy, truthfulness, and earnest struggle for the right."

In 1863, Smith was appointed professor of anthropology at Wilberforce University, in Ohio. He died two years later in New York, survived by his wife and five children.

Read More

What Did the Slaves Eat When They Arrived in America?

Research conducted by Lynne Olver, editor The Food Timeline

"It is difficult to assess the abundance or the quality of average Southern food in the absence of an average Southerner--that is, a member of the middle class, for there was not much middle class to occupy the wide gap between the plantation owner and the poor white, a group which already existed in those times and could hardly expect to rise to any comfortable standards of living in competition with the unpaid labor of slaves. The famous "hog and hominy" diet was at least rendered a little less unhealthy by the prevalence on the Southern menu of greens, often ignored by food writers, perhaps as a food so lowly as to be unworthy of their attention, but providers of vitamins all the same. A significant passage in Frederick Law Olmsted's Seabord Slave States, a product of his travels of the 1850s, suggests that slaves may have enjoyed a diet better balanced than that of may whites. Olmsted remarked that the more modest Southern planters lived on bacon (sometimes cooked with turnip greens), corn pone, coffee sweetened with molasses, and not much else, while their slaves had corn meal and salt pork, plus sweet potatoes of their own raising in the winter. Some owners encouraged the Negroes to grow vegetables for themselves also, because thy discovered that "negroes fed on three-quarters of a pound of bread and bacon are more prone to disease than if with less meat but with vegetables." It did not occur to the masters to draw any conclusions from this empirical observation for their own benefit."

---Eating in America: A History, Waverly Root & Richard de Rochemont [William Morrow and Company:New York] 1976 (p. 145)

"Corn and pork were Southern staples of diets for both master and slave. The master might have delicate puddings and hot breads, rich with eggs and cream, and thin slices of choice smoked ham, while his slaves at mush and chitlins; but it was still corn and pork. The rations issued in "The Quarters" were likely to be light on meat, with hominy or sweet potatoes added to the ration of cornmeal. On some plantations work was assigned by task. Workers who finished early might have the rest of the day to fish or hunt, to work in their own vegetable gardens, or to tend their own livestock, varying, when possibly, the monotonous rations. From the big house rations plus what the slaves could grow, hunt, or catch for themselves, grew the beginnings of the cuisine we today call "soul food"."

---Better Homes and Gardens Heritage Cook Book [Meredith Corporation:New York] 1975 (p. 145)

[NOTE: this book contains several popular period recipes adapted for modern kitchens]

"The cultivation of their own crops by slaves during the free time that they task system afforded them made a strong impression on white observers. Johann Bolzius explained that "they are given as much land as they can handle" and that "they plant for themselves also on Sundays." Hans Trachsler, a German visitor to Carolina, noted the slaves' system of self-provisioning by explaining how "these people were worth a high price because they are much more able to do the work and much cheaper to keep in food and drink than the Europeans."...Reflecting their extensive backcountry interaction with Native Americans, slaves leavened with West African diet with a number of Native American methods of food acquisition...Janet Schaw, a visitor to Carolina, noted that "Negroes are the only people that seem to pay any attention to the various uses that the wild vegetables may be put to." Slaves routinely shot and ate opossum, deer, rabbits, and raccoon...Carolina slaves further supplemented their diet with ample amounts of fish...In addition to corn, rice, beans, and pumpkins, archaeological excavations have unearthed evidence of peach pits, walnuts, and grape seeds...For all the abundance of grains, vegetables, and fruit that slaves grew in their "little piece[s] of land," domestic animals were virtually nonexistent. For meat, they depended on their masters, and their masters proved to be less than reliable--if not completely negligent--suppliers. One slave overseer mentions that slaves "never had any meat except at Christmas." Excavations show almost no proof of domestic beef or pork. "If a master wishes," Bolzius explained, "He gives them a little meat when he slaughters," but otherwise "their food is nothing but Indian corn, beans, pounded rice, potatoes, pumpkins."

---A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, James E. McWilliams [Columbia University Press:New York] 2005 (p. 158-162)

Read More

Jonathan Letterman: Civil War Surgeon Set The Standard For Battlefield Medicine

Surgeon in Blue (Book)

Jonathan Letterman, the Civil War Doctor Who Pioneered Battlefield Care

by Scott McGaugh

Article by NPR Staff

July 1, 2013, marked 150 years since the beginning of the Battle of Gettysburg, a crucial victory for the Union and a turning point in the Civil War. But it came at an enormous cost to both sides — thousands of soldiers were killed and tens of thousands more were wounded.

However, it might have been even worse had it not been for a surgeon named Jonathan Letterman, who served as the chief medical officer of the Union's Army of the Potomac. He presided over some of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history and, over the course of a single year, revolutionized military medicine.

Scott McGaugh has just released his biography of Letterman, called Surgeon in Blue. He joins NPR's Rachel Martin to discuss the father of battlefield medicine, what conditions were like before he came along and the legacy he left behind.

Interview Highlights

On the state of medicine in the United States at the start of the Civil War

"In a word, horrific. Military doctors were poorly qualified from a medical standpoint. They didn't know what caused infections, bacteria, anything of that sort. There was no ambulance system, so the early battles, such as Bull Run, left thousands of men wounded on the battlefield for days, some of them dying of dehydration and thirst. They were weakened to begin the battle because [the] Army diet was horrible, in the sense of salt pork, weevil-filled biscuits and alcohol as the daily ration. And their odds of survival, if they were wounded, were not very good in the early battles."

"They had very little place to go. They were dependent upon a few slackers, derelicts and Army band members who were typically assigned as ambulance crews. The ambulances were not nearly enough in number. No one expected to see the kinds of casualty numbers of Bull Run, which obviously became a harbinger of battles to come. If you were lucky enough to be ambulatory, you might have walked or hitched a ride back to Washington, and then walked the streets for several days looking for a hospital bed because there weren't nearly enough hospitals or hospital capacity in the early days of the Civil War."

On how Letterman improved Civil War medicine

"He stood in a remarkably fortuitous position in time. The commanding general, George McClellan, was something of a reformer; the surgeon general was a very deep-thinking reformer by the name of William Hammond, a young man. And that gave Letterman the opportunity to apply a very keen, analytical, holistic mind to health care, not just on the battlefield but before ever reaching the battlefield. And he was able to very quickly issue new regulations, make them mandatory with real authority, that defined and codified new standards in nutrition, camp hygiene, how and when latrines were dug and when they were covered, the disposal of lice-ridden uniforms. Because at the time when he took over, he was faced with a disease rate of nearly 40 percent."

On what it was like before Letterman developed the modern ambulance corps

"Prior to that, military officers routinely commandeered wagons intended as ambulances for their personal use and for their baggage with no repercussions. ... Luggage, personal belongings, even their servants in some cases. So one of the very first things Letterman did was acquire the authority from Gen. McClellan to hold military officers and medical officers accountable. [He] developed a corps of trained ambulance drivers and stretcher bearers, so he added a level, or created a level, of professionalism that had not been in existence."

On how keeping soldiers healthy wasn't just about compassion

"He believed that a healthier Army — wounded men who were kept with their units and treated in hospitals near the Army — were much more likely to return to battle [and] gave Gen. McClellan a stronger, more viable fighting force. And if that made him more effective, that might lead to a faster end to the war and the ability for everyone to go home."

Kristin Peelle/Courtesy Arcade Publishing

On Letterman's legacy

"Letterman clearly demonstrated that speed to care, what was once called 'the golden hour,' was absolutely crucial to a soldier's chances of survival.

"A refined triage concept, beginning with those paramedics ... alongside the stretcher, to the aid station, to the field hospital, all the way to a specialized hospital in the United States today. All those concepts, those principles, that all began with Jonathan Letterman. And today it's a hallmark of battlefield medicine, to a point where in World War II, 30 percent of soldiers succumbed to their wounds. Today, it's less than 10 percent."

Read More

James Hangar--A Teenager's Legacy

by Pat Granstra

When men lost their lives in the Civil War, their families lost sons and brothers, husbands and fathers–  and the world lost their potential.  Forever incalculable, the magnitude of those losses can only be suggested by acknowledging the accomplishments of those who survived the conflict.  Here is the story of a teenager whose single day of military service became a boon to soldiers of both sides.

 Throughout the morning of June 3, 1861, a young Confederate soldier lay unconscious and bleeding in a stable near Philippi, in northwest Virginia (now West Virginia).  Four hours after a Union cannonball tore through his left thigh, soldiers of the 16th Ohio Volunteers found him and summoned their surgeon, Dr. James D. Robinson, to the scene.

Determining that the lad’s life could be saved only by immediate amputation, Dr. Robinson performed surgery on a table improvised from a stable door.  During a 45-minute operation (done without benefit of anesthetic), he removed the young Confederate’s leg seven inches below the hip and stitched a flap of skin over the wound.  Dr. Robinson did not know he had completed the first of over 50,000 Civil War amputations.  He also did not know that the successful outcome of his surgery would impact not only his patient but also thousands of amputees long after the war.

*****

Robinson’s patient  was eighteen-year-old James Hanger from Churchville, Virginia.   A sophomore majoring in engineering at Washington College in Lexington at the start of the war, Hanger chose the Confederacy over the classroom and returned to Churchville to enlist in the town’s cavalry troop as two of his older brothers had done.  He was not among the orignial enlistees, but when an ambulance corps rolled through town on its way north to support the Churchville Cavalry and other Confederate forces under Colonel George Porterfield, young Hanger rode with it.

Outside Philippi on the evening of June 1, the ambulance corps encountered the Churchville Cavalry among Confederate forces retreating south before vastly superior Union forces.  Along with several other young men, he enlisted the next day.   The night of June 2 brought heavy rain, and as Hanger later wrote, the new soldiers “did not move, perhaps on account of the rain and the belief that the enemy would not march in such rain and darkness.”

In reality, the more experienced Union soldiers, two columns of them, had marched,  intending to trap the rebels between them at Philippi.  The weather had not deterred them, but it did upset their timing.  One column fired its opening shots before the other was in position, a misstep that afforded most of the southern soldiers an escape route.

Writing later, Hanger claimed he was hit by the third shot of a skirmish newspapers ostentatiously hearlded as the first land battle of the Civil War.  “The first two shots,” he wrote, “were canister and directed at the Cavalry Camps, the third shot was a 6 pound solid shot aimed at a stable in which the Churchville Cavalry Company had slept.  This shot struck the ground, richochedtted [sic], entering the stable and struck me.”

Robinson’s quick action and surgical skill saved Hanger’s life, and competent post-operative care, first in a private home and later in a Union hospital near Philippi, prompted a quick recovery.  Within a few weeks, Hanger’s stump healed sufficiently for him to be fitted with a wooden leg and sent to Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio.  He next went to Norfolk, Virginia as part of a prisoner exchange and returned to his parents’ home near Churchville in August.

Hanger’s impressive three-month recovery from near death was about to eclipsed by his activities of the next three months.

*****

Upon returning home, young James went upstairs, said he wanted to be left alone, and locked himself in his room. His parents respected his wishes, feeling that he needed time alone to come to grips with his life-changing injury.  They left meals and personal care items outside his door.  When he asked for oak barrel staves, they provided them. When buckets of wood shavings appeared outside his door, they assumed his was whittling to pass the time.  When he asked for pieces of metal, leather, and rubber, they complied.  When, after three months, he finally came downstairs, they were amazed.

Hanger had clumped upstairs on a clumsy wooden leg in August, but in November, he walked downstairs on the world’s first articulated prosthetic leg with knee and ankle joints.  Rather than succumbing to depression as an amputee, the former engineering student had turned to invention, designing and handcrafting a revolutionary artificial limb.

The leg functioned so well that Hanger was able to complete his enlistment committment by serving in the Stauton Home Guards.  While doing so, he was asked by other amputees to fashion limbs for them.  As the war dragged on and the number of amputations increased, Hanger realized that he and his penknife could not keep up with demand and set up production factories, first in Staunton and later in Richmond.  On March 23, 1863, he received Patent #155 “for an artificial limb” from the CSA patent office.  The following August, he filed patent papers for a newer, better version.  James Hanger, at age twenty, was a businessman.

*****

The end of the war did not bring an end to Hanger’s business, but it did bring changes. In 1871, Hanger returned to Churchville and produced prosthetics there.  Within a short time, the Commonwealth of Virginia contracted with him to produce limbs for veterans, and he expanded his business.  He also filed for additional patents, this time with the United States Patent Office.  In 1883, he moved the main office of J. E. Hanger, Inc. to Washington, D. C.

Hanger, who had married in 1873, moved his family to Washington as well.  Eventually all six of his sons joined in managing the ever-growing business.  Although Hanger officially retired in 1905, he continued to work on behalf of the firm.  He traveled to Europe following World War I to study amputation techniques there and made corresponding adaptations to his prosthetic devices.  He also picked up contracts in England and France.  When he died on June 15, 1919, his Washington-based company had branch offices in London and Paris as well as in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and St. Louis.

*****

In 1989, J. E. Hanger, Inc. was purchased by Hanger Orthopedic Group, Inc., one of largest producers of prosthetic limbs and related services worldwide.  The legacy of a Civil War teenager continues to enable hundreds of thousands of people across the world to regain normalcy following amputation.

From: Civil War Primer

Read More