Hospital transports : $b A memoir of the embarkation of the sick and wounded from the peninsula of Virginia in the summer of 1862 — John Shaqi
Hospital transports : $b A memoir of the embarkation of the sick and wounded from the peninsula of Virginia in the summer of 1862Olmsted, Frederick Law
History
Hospital transports : $b A memoir of the embarkation of the sick and wounded from the peninsula of Virginia in the summer of 1862
Olmsted, Frederick Law
Hospital ships -- United States -- History -- 19th century; Hospital ships -- Virginia -- History -- 19th century; Medical personnel -- United States -- Correspondence; Peninsular Campaign, 1862; Transports -- United States -- History -- 19th century; Transports -- Virginia -- History -- 19th centur
(A.) We began taking sick on the _Elm City_ this afternoon. I
telegraphed you about the crowded state of the post hospital. We had fed
this morning sixty men who had been turned away from it on the ground
that there was no room. I wrote to the surgeon in charge about this, and
B. called on him with my note. He merely said that he thought there
could not have been _as many_ as sixty turned away! These sixty men we
heard of as lying upon the railroad, without food, and with no one to
look after them. So some of the ladies got at once into the
stern-wheeler _Wissahickon_, which is the Commission's carriage, and
with provisions, basins, towels, soap, blankets, etc., went up to the
railroad-bridge, cooking tea and spreading bread as they went. After
twenty minutes' steaming, the men were found, put on freight-cars, and
pushed down to the landing, fed, washed, and taken on the tug to the
_Elm City_. Dr. Ware, in his hard-working on shore, had found fifteen
other sick men, without food, and miserable; there being "no room" for
them in the tent hospital. He had studied the neighborhood extensively
for shanties, found one, and put his men into it. The floor of the one
room up-stairs was six inches deep in beans, and made a good bed for
them, and in the morning the same party ran up on the tug, cooking
breakfast for them as they ran, scrambling eggs in a wash-basin over a
spirit-lamp.
* * * * *
(A.) The army struck its tents one night last week, and silently stole
away up the river. Bottom Bridge is ours, and no enemy met; the railroad
is repaired at White House, and trains will be running to-morrow;
barges, loaded with rolling stock and cannon, have been passing us on
the river all day.
The sick brought on board the _Elm City_ this afternoon had been lying
in a puddle, which nearly covered them. The water stood several inches
deep in some of the tents. These men were selected by Dr. Ware, as the
worst cases out of sixteen hundred in the shore hospital. (Several died
before they reached the mouth of the river.) Dr. Ware himself laid hold
to put up tents to protect men before the storm, and said that he saw
half a dozen tents yet remaining, not put up at nightfall, though men
were constantly arriving, and were left out in the ambulances.
If an engagement occurs this side of Richmond, my opinion is that we
shall have all the horrors of Pittsburg Landing in an aggravated form. I
have tried in vain to awaken some of the Head-quarters officers to a
sense of the danger; but while they admit all I say, they regard it as a
part of war, and say, "After all, there never was a war in which the
sick were as well taken care of. England does no better by her wounded;
true, they will suffer a good deal for a time, but that is inevitable in
war," &c.
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