Hammond hired some of America’s leading physicians as Medical Inspector Generals to visit each and every hospital to ensure that the new standards of care and sanitation were met. In conquered towns, buildings were refitted as places to treat and house the diseased and wounded. It consisted of specific trained personnel in outfitted mobile, field, brigade, general, specialty and rehabilitation hospitals. Under the leadership of the Union’s innovative Surgeon General Alexander Hammond (appointed in April 1862) and his brilliant medical director Jonathan Letterman, MD, an effective ambulance and hospital system was developed. It became the standard military wounded care delivery system through World War II. In the larger battles of the war the casualties were staggering: Antietam 22,717 Shiloh 23,746 Spotsylvania 30,000 Chickamauga 36,624 Gettysburg 51,000. Hospitals routinely took both Union and Confederate wounded. Local homes, churches and other structures were quickly turned into field hospitals. As there was no organized ambulance system to remove the wounded or an organized medical treatment system to treat the wounded, injured soldiers lay as long as three days on the battlefield. The North suffered 2,700 casualties, the South 1,900. At the first major land battle of the war on Jin Virginia at Manassas (Bull Run), two unproven green armies met and effectively slaughtered each other. The massive casualties of the first battles brought old school medical thinking and preparedness into turmoil. The time-honored military tactic of lining up soldiers a few dozen yards apart to shoot at each other proved catastrophic. It would not be until the last decade of the nineteenth century that hospitals were looked upon as places of healing.Īmerica’s hospital and medical system were not prepared for the devastation the new Minié ball bullet and the rifled cannon would inflict. In cities, hospitals were for the indigent and working classes, and had a reputation as places to die. In the decade before the war, American military action consisted of Native American skirmishes and the few wounded were treated at the various forts in small infirmaries.
One of the major accomplishments during the Civil War was the establishment of an effective hospital system that threaded the wounded and diseased through a series of continuously improving treatments and rehabilitation. Burns, MDĮditor’s Note: This essay series is written by Mercy Street's medical, historical and technical advisor, Stanley B.
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