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One group of soldiers was fighting only 100 yards from the station. Clyde Kernek describes how one station functioned at Gettysburg. By 1862, the Union Army abolished regimental hospitals, replacing them with a vast system of well-staffed division, corps and general hospitals.įield stations were set up at the edge of the battlefield by surgeons before a battle began. When these small hospitals filled up, there were no accommodations even for men from the same regiment. Intended to admit only men from a single regiment, hospital staff turned away outsiders. Early in the war there were also regimental hospitals, but these were small and in the regimental training camps, where the surgeon and assistant surgeon of the regiment cared for wounded or sick men.
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Those requiring a general hospital were transferred accordingly. Troops whose wounds were so serious they could not be helped were given narcotics those who required immediate attention were treated at a field station those with an injury that did not require emergency treatment, were transported to a field hospital out of range of the battle. Initially they walked or were carried to a field station, where they were triaged (sorted out) by severity of injury. Let us now examine how soldiers wounded on the battlefield were cared for. Unlike the Union Medical Department which was initially bogged down with senescent, disorganized doctors, the Confederate medical corps had no traditions hampering its officers. The number of medical officers in the Confederate Army has been estimated at 834 surgeons and 1,668 assistant surgeons there were also seventy-three medical officers in the Confederate Navy. Before the War, Moore was a member of the Medical Department of the United States Army, so it is not surprising that he structured the Medical Department of the Confederate Army in the same way. The South was most fortunate in having a single competent surgeon general, Samuel Preston Moore, from July 30, 1861, until the conclusion of the war. Nine days later Lincoln appointed William A. It directed that the surgeon general, assistant surgeon general, medical inspector general, and medical inspectors, immediately be appointed by the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate, by selection from the medical corps of the army, or from the surgeons in the volunteer service, without regard to rank, but with sole regard to qualifications. The act also rid the army of high-ranking senescent medical officers whose rank rested on seniority and not ability. Ĭongress radically changed the structure of the Medical Department of the Union Army on April 16, 1862, raising the rank of surgeon general from colonel to brigadier general, assuring his control through the Medical Department of patient care and welfare in the Union Army.
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Except during huge battles, such as Antietam and Gettysburg, they did not serve on the battlefield. The Union Army also employed 85 acting surgeons and 5,532 acting assistant surgeons, who served as “contract surgeons” in general hospitals. Regimental surgeons numbered 2,109, and regimental assistant surgeons 3,882. By 1865, 547 surgeons and assistant surgeons of volunteers were appointed. These officers were listed on the muster-rolls, were permanently attached to their regiment, and were not detached unless an urgent situation arose. Each regiment contained a surgeon and an assistant surgeon commissioned by the state enlisting the troops. President Lincoln’s call for suppression of the rebellion in 1861, raised large numbers of state troops (militia). This system served well an army scattered over a large territory in commands of less than regimental strength ( there were approximately1,000 men in a regiment.) They were subject to duty whenever and wherever their services were required. These officers formed part of the General Staff of the army and were not permanently attached to any regiment or command. Its Medical Department was composed of a surgeon general, with the rank of colonel thirty surgeons, with the rank of major and eighty-four assistant surgeons, with the rank for the first five years of first lieutenant, and thereafter, until promotion to surgeon, the rank of captain. To understand the structure and function of Civil War hospitals, it is necessary to know the organization of the medical department of the pre-Civil War army and its subsequent development in the Union and Confederate Armies.īefore South Carolina seceded from the United States in December 1860, the small Regular Army consisted of 1,117 commissioned officers and 11,907 enlisted men.