On September 22, he wrote: “Very meager are accommodations—no chamber pots & nobody to find or rig one up. How ludicrous for 2 score amputated men to help themselves with diarrhea.” On the 26th he recorded, “This cold weather may come for the best, certainly maggots do not trouble so much.” On the 29th he sounded comparatively upbeat, and was “quite comfortable if the quinine does not choke me to death.” Stowe died, however, on October 1.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in America's Civil War magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Charles Johnson of the 9th New York Volunteers had been shot in the left hip, and as he made his way to a hospital on the Michael Miller farm he remembered that “by the time I got there, faint from loss of blood and exertion…the terrible sights and sounds that met me as I approached the hospital did not tend to relieve my mind. There were already over a hundred of our boys…lying on straw and on cornstalks, with wounds of all imaginable shapes and sizes. The sights were terrible, but the sounds were more so, as a general thing, our boys made light of their wounds.”

The overwhelming numbers of wounded, lack of supplies and limited qualified personnel quickly began to take its toll on the doctors. A physician on duty at the Michael Miller farm observed on September 24: “Every object in the landscape was [not] tainted with the ravages of war, and around us the eye could wander without resting on bloody and mutilated forms, some laughing, some joking, some praying, some groaning, and some, alas, with the death rattle in their throats. If I could only get away from all this, change the bloody and filthy clothes I was compelled to wear for something clean, and what would I have not given for a bed on which I could get one night’s sleep…everything conspired against me as if to see how miserable a human life could be made.”

Doctor Dimon’s journal entries also reflect frustration: “I am slowly traveling through the disposal of and provision for 140 poor fellows under my care. Surgery, surgery, surgery. Food, food, food. Nurses, nurses, nurses. Cooks that get drunk. Everybody employed looking out for number one; nobody caring for anyone else. Surgeons come here to get me to take care of their sick, not knowing or caring to do anything but shirk them off on me.”

September soon turned to October, and as cooler weather approached simple necessities were still lacking in the hospitals. The New York Times reported that “Shirts, drawers, sheets, blankets, pillows, pillow-slips, bedsteads, large sized slippers, tea, crackers, tea cups, wash-basins, candles, lanterns, pails, bed-pans, and urinals and stationery for the soldiers to write letters on are some of the most pressing articles needed. The most essential medicines such as morphine, quinine, salts, castor oil, adhesive plasters, and tobacco would be of great value.”

Dr. Holt remembered, “Oh how cold and almost frozen I have been for a week past, sleeping [in] the open air with a blanket and the arch of heaven for a covering and the rough ground for a bed.”

The surgeon was amazed at the vitality of some of those left in his care. He wrote: “Last night a man died of typhoid fever, and quite a number look as if they would soon follow. Poor fellows, when I see the way in which they lie and the lack of all earthly comforts—without wife, mother or sister to care for them or even get them a glass of cold water to cool their parched tongues. I wonder how any get well; but they appear to do about as well in the poor quarters which they occupy as those who are better cared for. I have been astonished at the vitativeness of these men—nothing seems capable of killing them.”

Fortunately for the surgeons, and especially for their charges, various aid societies and volunteers stepped in to provide whatever assistance they could. A New York Times reporter wrote that the “inhabitants of the villages are laboring night and day to relieve the dying and the suffering. A more Christian people, in the practical sense of the word, I never saw.”

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to