The Union, which began the war with only one 40-bed military infirmary, that in Kansas, ended it with 181,000 hospital beds. ![]() Critically ill indigent ended life warehoused in comparable "poorhouses."īecause of the war's overwhelming numbers of wounded and ill, "pavilion" hospitals - airy, easy-to-clean, designed with central nursing stations and common corridors used today - evolved.īy war's end, the Confederate Chimborazo Hospital just east of Richmond, Va., was the reunited nation's largest, with some 8,000 beds. "We've given that gift to the world."īefore the war, the only hospitals had been "pest houses," charitably run places where people with contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, and smallpox were isolated to die. ![]() Kummerow, the museum's executive director. "The concept of hospitals as places to cure patients, not to just let them die, was another major development," points out Burton K. Early in the war, chronic diarrhea was a major killer as well as spreader of disease. Not least was public sanitation - systematized cleanliness, separating latrines from water and food in campsites, for example. You also learn quickly in touring just the one floor (out of three planned) what other medical changes that are taken for granted in the 1990s grew out of the war. So amputation was quick - three to five minutes in many cases - and while not without risk, a much better wager on life than leaving the patient to die, almost certainly, from infection or blood loss. Europeans such as Joseph Lister were only on the verge of discovering germs. The museum's goriest element, discretely played over-and-over on videotape next to a reconstructed field hospital, is a chillingly realistic leg amputation concocted by Civil War re-enactors.īut, you learn that even under the best of conditions, those so-called "sawbones" doctors could not beat infections, including deadly gangrene. But even with only a few of Dammann's items on display now, the museum's exhibits reshape such skepticism without sugarcoating the obvious. Because everyone has read about and in movies has seen the Civil War's "surgeons," who left behind more than 50,000 legs and arms amputated at various battlegrounds. Go ahead, cynics, call a positive spin on a time better known for medical practices bordering on the barbaric reconstructive history. No fewer than 29 churches, schools and other buildings in Frederick, many near today's museum, served as hospitals at some point during the war. This material constitutes the private, non-profit museum's starting point.įrederick was chosen for its location because the city actually was a major wartime medical center - central to major battles at Gettysburg, Antietam, Harper's Ferry, on the Monocacy, all along South Mountain, and south into the Shenandoah Valley. Stories that personalize the war this way - for soldiers and doctors alike - accompany many of the 3,000 medical tools, devices, kits, packages, medicines, accouterments, and rare documents collected by Gordon Dammann. Gurdon Buck, the New York doctor who did the work, is regarded as the father of modern plastic surgery.Īdd a happy ending: Burgan was discharged from the army, married, and had "many" children before dying at age 71 in 1915. His face has been restored to near-normal dimensions and features, though thickly scarred with Frankensteinesque seams where live tissue was stitched to cover a reconstructed jaw, cheek and nose. So the "remedy" ate away much of the soft tissue inside the young soldier's mouth, not to mention his jawbone, right cheekbone and eye, and part of his nose.Ī "before" photo of Burgan's disease-eroded face reminds you of a grotesque Popeye in extremis.
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