![]() The printed register itself defines a case by the content assigned to each column. 6 The first soldiers arrived on April 26, 1864, and formed the majority of the 1,583 patients until it closed in September 1865, although some civilians continued to be treated there. Bigelow's Hospital (as it was called in the L'Ouverture Hospital register). Named after Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the revolution that had freed the slaves in Haiti, the hospital opened with the transfer of sixteen civilian patients from Dr. 5 As the number of black soldiers increased throughout 1863, the army decided that it needed a proper military hospital for them and established one with hospital tents set up around buildings on the corner of Prince and Payne Streets. That hospital, according to Julia Wilbur, a member of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society who came to Washington to help the freedmen, regularly lacked needed supplies and was routinely neglected by Dr. John Reynolds Bigelow, who was nominally in charge of all health needs of the freed people of Alexandria. ![]() ![]() 4 Before L'Ouverture opened on February 15, 1864, African Americans in Alexandria had sought relief in a hospital run by Dr. It is unique because it was used in the only general military hospital in the Department of Washington created for black soldiers. 3 It is typical because physically it is the same as all printed registers distributed to general hospitals in 1864. The register for L'Ouverture Hospital in Alexandria is both typical and unique. L'Ouverture Hospital Register: Cases as Data Points Both convey truths about medical experiences during the Civil War, but those truths are inevitably partial, fragmented, and at times frustratingly ephemeral. Accounts about individual soldiers extracted from the MSHWR for hospitals in the District of Columbia and Alexandria offer the texts for reading cases as narratives. 2 For this essay, a register for L'Ouverture Hospital, one of the military hospitals in Alexandria, provides the entrance point for reading cases as data points. We can read cases, then, at multiple moments in the records left behind. Others may have made just one data point, but survived long enough to become the centers of narratives that focused on the intersections between soldiers' bodies and the army medical system. Some soldiers made many data points, as they got sick and got well, were wounded and healed, or became sick and wounded and died. The second refers to the case as a story, a narrative-even if a very short narrative-of a doctor's experience with illness, wounding, or multiple illnesses, multiple wounds, or even wounds combined with illnesses. The first refers to the case as a data point, an entry in a field report or hospital register. 1 Thousands of illustrative accounts of individual soldiers' cases then put flesh on the tables of numbers that fill the MSHWR's first volume.Īlready I have used "cases" in two quite different senses. After the war, the Surgeon General's Office processed over six million cases to create the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion ( MSHWR) seeking to transform this data into medical knowledge. Surgeons' field and inspection reports, case notes, and pathological specimens added depth to the breadth of this data. This bureaucratic need for medical records laid the groundwork for the data that the Surgeon General's Office accumulated during the war. The army had to issue pay to the sick and wounded and, if a soldier was discharged for medical reasons, to determine eligibility for pensions. The medical record thus began as a practical military record: how many men can mount the defenses, march, make camp, and fight? The army then needed to keep track of men as they moved through the medical system, from regimental sick call to general hospitals, from initial event to recovery, return to duty, discharge, or death. At that moment, the surgeon composed a record, as it was his duty to make a daily report to his commanding officer on the number of men fit to serve. A soldier stationed in the District of Columbia during the Civil War entered medical awareness when he reported to his regimental surgeon claiming illness or injury.
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