Hardtack and coffee

by John Davis Billings

As fast as they could be procured, hospital tents were furnished, three to a regiment, in accordance with the provision of Army Regulations referred to. Each regiment provided its own nurses and cooks. In general hospitals one nurse was allowed to ten patients, and one cook to thirty.

The capacity of a regimental hospital tent, like a stagecoach, varied according to the demand for room. I have said they were designed to accommodate eight. An old army surgeon says, “Only six can be comfortably accommodated in one of them, three on each side.” But when the surgeons were crowded with the wounded, it was a common practice to set two long narrow boards edgewise through the centre of the tent, about twenty inches apart. If boards were wanting, two good-sized poles were cut and used instead. Between these was the passage for the surgeons and nurses. Behind the boards or poles a filling of straw or fine boughs was made and covered with blankets. On these latter could be placed twenty patients, ten on either side; but they were crowded. When six single cots were put in one of these tents, three on each side, ample space was afforded to pass among them.

A TWO-WHEELED AMBULANCE.

In the latter part of 1861, the government, realizing its pressing needs, began to build general hospitals for the comfort and accommodation of its increasing thousands of sick and wounded, continuing to build, as the needs increased, to the very last year of the war, when they numbered two hundred and five.

Before the civil war, the government had never been supplied with carriages to convey the sick and wounded. Only two years before, a board, appointed by the secretary of war, had adopted for experiment a four-wheeled and a two-wheeled carriage. The four-wheeled vehicle was tried in an expedition sent into New Mexico, and was favorably reported on; the two-wheeled was never tested, but was judged to be the best adapted to badly wounded men (though the contrary proved to be the fact), and so the board reported in favor of adopting these carriages in the ratio of five two-wheeled to one four-wheeled.

When Surgeon Tripler took charge, he found several of these two-wheeled carriages in Washington, but they were used chiefly as pleasure-carriages for officers, or for some other private purpose. This was stopped, for a time at least, and an order was issued, leaving one to a regiment and requiring the rest to be turned over to the quartermaster’s department. But the perversion of ambulances from their proper use, I will add in passing, continued, to a greater or less extent, till the end of the war. This very year McClellan issued an order for them not to be used except for the transportation of the sick and wounded, unless by authority of the brigade commander, the medical director, or the quartermaster in charge, and the provost-marshal was ordered to arrest officers and confine non-commissioned officers and privates for violation of the order.

The most important steps taken towards organizing the medical department, and placing it on that thorough basis which distinguished it in the later years of the war, were the result of the foresight, energy, and skilful management of Dr. Jonathan Letterman, who was made medical director of the Army of the Potomac on the 19th of June, 1862. His labor was something enormous. It was during the progress of the Peninsular Campaign. All was confusion. Medical supplies were exhausted. Thousands of sick and wounded men were dying for want of proper care and medicine. Yet this campaign, so disastrous in its results to our army from a military point of view, was a valuable teacher in many respects, and one of its most pointed and practical lessons was the necessity shown of having the ambulances organized and under a competent head. It remained for Dr. Letterman to appreciate this need, and effect an organization which remained practically unchanged till the close of the war. Here is the substance of the plan which he drew up, and which General McClellan approved, and published to the army in orders, Aug. 2, 1862, and which General Meade reissued, with some additions and slight changes, a little more than a year later.

AMBULANCE CORPS.

All of the ambulances belonging to an army corps were to be placed under the control of the medical director of that corps, for now, in addition to a medical director of the army, there was a subordinate medical director for each army corps. Such an ambulance corps was put into the hands of a captain as commandant. This corps was divided and subdivided into division, brigade, and regimental trains, corresponding to the divisions of the army corps to which it belonged, having a first lieutenant in charge of a division, a second lieutenant in charge of a brigade, and a sergeant in charge of a regimental detachment. Besides these, three privates, one of them being the driver, were to accompany each ambulance on the march and in battle. The duties of all these men, both officers and privates, were very carefully defined, as well for camp as for the march and battle. Besides the ambulances, there accompanied each corps one medicine-wagon and one army wagon to a brigade, containing the requisite medicines, dressings, instruments, hospital stores, bedding, medical books, small furniture (like tumblers, basins, bed-pans, spoons, vials, etc.).