Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "complete patient listings of more than 18,000 patients."--dust jacket.

This work tells the story of Samuel Hollingsworth Stout, an innovative Confederate doctor and medical director of the Army of Tennessee, and his successful administration and establishment of more than sixty mobile military hospitals scattered throughout the western theatre.

Confederate Hospitals on the Move tells the story of one innovative Confederate doctor and his successful administration of the military hospitals that served behind the Army of Tennessee's transient battle lines. In 1864, at the peak of his career, Samuel Hollingsworth Stout managed more than sixty medical facilities scattered from Montgomery, Alabama, to Augusta, Georgia. Glenna Schroeder-Lein reveals how this doctor-turned-talented-administrator established and oversaw some of the most adaptable, efficient, and well-administered hospitals in the Confederacy. Through Stout's eyes Schroeder-Lein describes the selection of hospital sites, the care and feeding of patients, the provisioning of the hospitals, and the personnel who cared for the sick and wounded. She also discusses the movement of the hospitals and how the facilities were affected by overcrowding, supply shortages, and the scarcity of transportation. Using the 1,500 pounds of hospital records that Stout saved during his tenure in the Army of Tennessee, Schroeder-Lein demonstrates that Stout was a rarity both in his competence as an administrator and in his penchant for saving wartime documents. She traces Stout's prewar years, his ascension to directorship of the hospitals, his success in administering the facilities, and his failure to find a niche for his talents in a civilian setting after the war's end. The first study of a Confederate army hospital system from the vantage point of a medical director, Confederate Hospitals on the Move offers new information on the difficulties facing Confederate hospitals on the western front as opposed to the more stable, protected hospitals in the East. In addition, the book supplements previous research on the care of the wounded and on medical practices during the Civil War period. --

As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront. Schultz uses government records, private manuscripts, and published sources by and about women hospital workers, some of whom are familiar--such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, and Sojourner Truth--but most of whom are not well-known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women, Schultz considers who they were, how they became involved in wartime hospital work, how they adjusted to it, and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white, but became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves. Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives--their professional and domestic choices, their pursuit of pensions, and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work, and their extremely varied postwar experiences, Schultz argues, defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism, triumphalism, or conciliation.

In antebellum society, women were regarded as ideal nurses because of their sympathetic natures. However, they were expected to exercise their talents only in the home; nursing strange men in hospitals was considered inappropriate, if not indecent. Nevertheless, in defiance of tradition, Confederate women set up hospitals early in the Civil War and organized volunteers to care for the increasing number of sick and wounded soldiers. As a fledgling government engaged in a long and bloody war, the Confederacy relied on this female labor, which prompted a new understanding of women’s place in public life and a shift in gender roles. Challenging the assumption that Southern women’s contributions to the war effort were less systematic and organized than those of Union women, Worth a Dozen Men looks at the Civil War as a watershed moment for Southern women. Female nurses in the South played a critical role in raising army and civilian morale and reducing mortality rates, thus allowing the South to continue fighting. They embodied a new model of heroic energy and nationalism, and came to be seen as the female equivalent of soldiers. Moreover, nursing provided them with a foundation for pro-Confederate political activity, both during and after the war, when gender roles and race relations underwent dramatic changes. Worth a Dozen Men chronicles the Southern wartime nursing experience, tracking the course of the conflict from the initial burst of Confederate nationalism to the shock and sorrow of losing the war. Through newspapers and official records, as well as letters, diaries, and memoirs—not only those of the remarkable and dedicated women who participated, but also of the doctors with whom they served, their soldier patients, and the patients’ families—a comprehensive picture of what it was like to be a nurse in the South during the Civil War emerges.

Chimborazo Hospital, just outside Richmond, Virginia, served as the Confederacy's largest hospital for four years. During this time, it treated nearly eighty thousand patients, boasting a mortality rate of just over 11 percent. This book, the first full-length study of a facility that was vital to the Southern war effort, tells the story of those who lived and worked at Chimborazo. Organized by Dr. James Brown McCaw, Chimborazo was an innovative hospital with well-trained physicians, efficient stewards, and a unique supply system. Physicians had access to the latest medical knowledge and specialists in Richmond. The hospital soon became a model for other facilities. The hospital's clinical reputation grew as it established connections with the Medical College of Virginia and hosted several drug and treatment trials requested by the Confederate Medical Department. In fascinating detail, Chimborazo recounts the issues, trials, and triumphs of a Civil War hospital. Based on an extensive study of hospital and Confederate Medical Department records found at the National Archives, along with other primary sources, the study includes information on the patients, hospital stewards, matrons, and slaves who served as support staff. Since Chimborazo was designated as an independent army post, the book discusses other features of its organization, staff, and supply system as well. This careful examination describes the challenges facing the hospital and reveals the humanity of those who lived and worked there.

Madison, Georgia was a hoppin' place while it hosted three (and later a fourth) Confederate hospitals during the eight months before their final retreat in July 1864. Every few days the train depot was a flurry of activity as surgeons, attendants, and locals unloaded hundreds of sick and wounded soldiers fresh from the battles in Tennessee and North Georgia. Most of the records of their care were saved by the Director of Hospitals of the Army of Tennessee and then ferreted out 140 years later by the author from collections scattered across many states. This book includes verbatim transcriptions of those documents, the subsequent hospital histories, surgeon biographies, and thousands of names in hundreds of regiments.