The city of Philadelphia played a large and pivotal role in the treatment of the sick and wounded, becoming, by war’s end, the largest center for medical care in the United States. In addition to being a hub for medical education, it was located at the nexus of many lines of transportation. These facts made Philadelphia indispensible as a center for medical treatment. Eventually, there were over ten thousand hospital beds available throughout the city. Referrals were also made to civilian hospitals for special services. Due to its geographical position, Philadelphia received patients both by ship and by rail from the nearby camps and battlefields. Consequently, the hospitals were nearly always kept full. The greatest tax on their facilities, however, came after great battles, such as Antietam or Gettysburg, when the city was so crowded with suffering men that the hospitals were unable to care for them all and many were lodged in firehouses and churches. The Methodist Church at Broad and Christian Streets, the Presbyterian Church at Broad and Fitzwater Streets and Saint Theresa’s at Broad and Catherine Streets were the most frequently used. Although Philadelphia hospitals received a greater proportion of wounded and sick soldiers than the general hospitals elsewhere, the percentage of deaths was the lowest in the army medical department.94
During the war, there were twenty-four military hospitals, plus branches, at one time or another, with smaller hospitals that also treated troops. Following the Battle of Gettysburg, Assistant Surgeon General James R. Smith informed Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtain that five thousand beds within the city were available to men wounded in that battle. In the next few weeks, more than ten thousand soldiers were transferred from Gettysburg to Philadelphia.95
On January 1, 1866, the Philadelphia branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization chartered by Congress to give aid and badly needed volunteer services to troops, reported that approximately 157,000 soldiers and sailors were cared for in Philadelphia military hospitals during the course of the war. Over 6,000 of the sick and wounded died. But this was a smaller proportion than in all the other Northern states.96
Philadelphia also hosted specialty hospitals, most notably the Turner’s Lane Hospital, where prominent physician Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was in charge. Here, Dr. Mitchell and his colleagues studied nerve disorders and injuries, such as paralysis, spasms and epilepsy (considered a nervous disease at the time). Detailed case histories were essential to such research and to medical care in general.97
U.S. General Hospital at Broad and Cherry Streets. The hospital was situated in the former depot of the Reading Railroad. GAR Museum Collection.
The first casualties of the Civil War were brought to Pennsylvania Hospital. These were the men of the Washington Brigade who had been attacked in Baltimore on April 19, 1861. Their wounded were brought back to Philadelphia to the PW & B Station on Broad and Washington. At that time, Pennsylvania Hospital was the closest hospital to that depot. The hospital was founded in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond to care for the “sick, poor and insane of Philadelphia.” It is still located at Eighth and Spruce Streets. Pennsylvania Hospital’s surgical expertise brought hundreds of casualties to its wards for special treatment. The War Department paid the hospital a fee for each serviceman it treated.98
Some Philadelphia military hospitals reused older buildings. For instance, Haddington Hospital near Sixty-fifth and Vine Streets, with two hundred beds, was housed in an old hotel. Most of the hospitals had fewer than five hundred beds, but two of the largest military or general hospitals in the country were located in Philadelphia. These were West Philadelphia, or Satterlee General Hospital, with more than four thousand beds, and Mower General Hospital, which was located on the Reading Railroad line in Chestnut Hill. The latter was designed by John McArthur, the architect of the present city hall. It could accommodate four thousand patients. These new hospitals were constructed using the “pavilion system.” Since bad air was thought to spread infection, the wards had large windows and extensive ventilation systems.99
Most of the military hospitals were either installed in an existing building felt to be suitable for the purpose or were constructed on open ground using the pavilion system of long, narrow, pavilion-like structures as wards constructed of lumber usually 160 to 170 feet long and 24 feet wide. Also constructed were a laundry, nurses’ rooms, offices, a guardroom and a knapsack room where soldiers’ gear could be stored. The hospital was usually built on higher ground with good ventilation, breezes and woods for shade, along or near creeks or wells for good, clean water and near to a transportation network.
Satterlee General Hospital was an example of the pavilion style. Satterlee was constructed with fourteen parallel pavilions, each being 167 feet by 24 feet, which projected from each of the corridors at 21-foot intervals. There were at its height of service thirty-six wards in the hospital, twenty-eight wards in the wooden barrack-style buildings and eight wards in the tented campground that could be supplied in times of great necessity. The construction of the hospital was completed rapidly in less than forty days.
There were eleven attendants to each one hundred patients in the wards. There were thirty-five medical officers on duty, including eighteen medical cadets. Each ward, in theory, had a surgeon, a Sister of Charity, a ward master, three male nurses and a medical cadet assigned. If a surgeon was not available, then an assistant surgeon would take over.100
Satterlee General Hospital. A contemporary sketch of the giant hospital complex in West Philadelphia. GAR Museum Collection.
Hospitals required many and varied medical personnel, surgeons, nurses, apothecaries, clerks, guards, musicians, administrators and mechanics, cooks, laundresses and a host of others. At the start of the war, most nurses were male, since women in Victorian society were not yet accepted as caregivers for men who did not belong to their families. Gradually, however, female nurses, including Catholic nuns, became more common, either as paid workers or as volunteers.101 Organizations of volunteers, such as the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the U.S. Christian Commission, contributed greatly to patient care, donating money, supplies and labor. The Great Central Sanitary Fair of 1864 raised large sums of money for the Sanitary Commission’s work.
Each hospital was placed under the supervision of a surgeon in chief who had complete control over its management. He was assisted by assistant surgeons, as well as medical cadets, who were frequently medical students who volunteered their services; nurses, male and female; a ward master; support personnel; invalid soldiers of the Veteran Reserve Corps (VRC) who could perform light duties; and sundry other personnel, such as the military band and a chaplain to minister to the patients’ spiritual needs.102
Satterlee was one of the largest hospitals in the country. Located in a West Philadelphia neighborhood near the intersection of Forty-second Street and Baltimore Avenue, its sixteen-acre grounds ran north to Forty-fifth and Pine Streets. The hospital featured a library, reading room, barbershop and printing office that printed its newspaper, the Hospital Register.
Water was obtained from the mill creek that was located nearby. The hospital was opened for patients on June 9, 1862. It was named Satterlee in honor of General Richard Satterlee, MD, a military surgeon from New York. With a capacity of three thousand beds in the permanent facility and one thousand more in tents, it was the largest military hospital in the United States until the opening of Mower General Hospital in Chestnut Hill. More than sixty thousand soldiers and sailors were cared for at Satterlee Hospital before its closure on August 3, 1865. Clarence Clark Park is the present location of the parade ground and tent portion of the facility. The park contains a memorial to this hospital, a granite rock from Devil’s Den at Gettysburg.
Dr. Isaac I. Hayes, the famous Arctic explorer, was appointed surgeon in charge. Although rigid military discipline was enforced here, everything possible was done to make the patients comfortable. Forty-two Catholic Sisters of Charity and women from the Ladies’ Aid Society, Penn Relief Association and the Ladies’ Association for Soldiers’ Relief were in constant attendance in the wards. A library, reading and writing room contained newspapers from various parts of the country, and a billiard room and entertainment hall were also provided. A military band supplied music for daily concerts as well as for dress parades and dirges for the dead.
Satterlee was opened in 1862 by order of Surgeon General William A. Hammond. By May 1864, more than 12,000 patients had been treated. Only 260 suffered deaths, a remarkable accomplishment considering the sanitary conditions of the day. At the height of the influx of patients, mostly after great battles, the hospital could expand to 4,500 beds.
In Stewart Bulkley’s reminiscences of Satterlee Hospital during the Civil War, a most interesting account is given of the tenderness and devotion of Mother Gonzaga, mother superior of the Sisters of Charity whose care of the sick and the wounded ever remained memorable. A veteran of the 142nd Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers, Bulkley said of the saintly sister:
Mother Gonzaga was a mother to about fifty soldiers in the Satterlee United States Hospital during the years from 1862 to 1865. No matter what the creed, her devotion was ever the same, and not a few soldiers recalled in after years the midnight visits of Mother Gonzaga—as she was called by the men—her silent steps after “taps” and in the dim gaslight were listened for, and with her white-winged head-dress she flitted from bed to bed to soothe and cheer the suffering soldiers. She was one of the purest and loveliest of women, and the mention of her name with that of old Satterlee Hospital is only a fitting tribute to her gentle memory.
Mower General Hospital. A contemporary sketch of the giant hospital complex in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia. GAR Museum Collection.
At Forty-second Street and the Schuylkill River, back of Woodlands Cemetery, there was, in 1862, a steamboat landing, where the sick and wounded were brought. From there they were carried in carts and ambulances manned by patriotic firemen and other manner of conveyances to Satterlee Hospital.103
Mower General Hospital was located between Abington and Springfield Avenues, County Line Road and the Chestnut Hill track of the Reading Railroad and was erected by the same contractor who built Satterlee Hospital. Like it, Mower was of lumber, rough cast on the outside. With a capacity at first of 2,820 beds, later more than 4,000 beds were made available in fifty wards. The hospital opened on January 17, 1863. Today, the former hospital site is at the Chestnut Hill Village Apartments, adjacent to the current Wyndmoor Railroad Station. The surgeon in chief was Dr. J. Hopkinson. The hospital had a full band and drum corps furnishing daily music. The hospital was technologically very advanced and boasted a very low rate of death.
John MacArthur Jr., the designer of Philadelphia City Hall, laid out plans for Mower Hospital and other new-style army hospitals. Mower was named for Thomas Mower, an army surgeon. The hospital was one of the largest and most innovative in the Union. Its design could limit the spread of infection by sealing off wards and centered on an administrative area with barracks, dining halls, surgeries, kitchens, mortuary, etc. Wards radiated out as spokes on a wheel with about fifty to one hundred beds per ward.
Patients were brought directly from the battlefield by trains using special hospital cars converted from sleeping cars. This terrible journey was known among the servicemen as the “seven circles of hell to heaven on earth,” a journey lasting days or even weeks. The railroad also carried families of the patients, hospital workers and volunteers. Nearly three thousand people visited the hospital each week.
An existing freshwater supply of the Chestnut Hill Water Company was used (the stone water tower on Ardleigh Street still stands today). Mower occupied a tract of twenty-seven acres extending from County Line (Stenton Avenue) to Germantown Avenue, Springfield Avenue to Abington Avenue, and was built on the highest level point in Philadelphia.
The hospital was laid out in a geometric pattern. Tramways extended in the wards to bring medical supplies and food in carts with flanged wheels. Mower contained butcher shops, a guardhouse, a chapel, a library with 2,400 volumes, an operating theater and the dead house/mortuary. There were many advanced conveniences, including gas lighting, indoor plumbing, constant hot water and ventilation.104
Additional, though smaller, military hospitals were opened around the city to accommodate the large numbers of sick, wounded and debilitated men arriving every day. These included the McClellan Hospital located at Wayne Junction, Germantown Road and Cayuga Street, in the Nicetown section of North Philadelphia.105 Summit House Hospital was located on the west side of Darby Road near Paschalville, a small village in West Philadelphia, four miles from the Market Street Bridge.106 Haddington Hospital was located in Haddington, a section of West Philadelphia, historically that section of Haverford Avenue between Sixty-fifth and Sixty-seventh Streets. Haddington was initially housed in the Bull’s Head Tavern on Sixty-fifth and Vine Streets, placed near the property of the Butcher’s and Drover’s Association on the southwest corner of Haverford Avenue and the Merion and Darby Roads.107 Cuyler Hospital was located at the Germantown Town Hall.108 Broad Street Hospital was located in the old station of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company on Broad Street, below Race, and on the southeast corner of Cherry Street, east of Broad.109 Citizens’ Volunteer Hospital was supported and financed entirely by the private donations of citizens. Foremost in extent and capacity among the centrally located hospitals, this charitable establishment was located opposite the depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad.110 Christian Street Hospital was located in the old Moyamensing Hall, on the south side of Christian Street, below Tenth Street. The building had also served as the police station for the Second Ward.111 Turner’s Lane Hospital, sometimes referred to as the “German” Hospital, was located at Twentieth and Norris Streets in North Philadelphia west of Broad Street. The Union army rented it from the German Hospital of Philadelphia from 1862 through 1866. A special study of the diseases of the nerves caused by wounds was conducted at this hospital by famed surgeons S. Weir Mitchell, W.W. Keen and Jacob A. DaCosta. Here, they undertook research on “irritable heart” (neurocirculatory asthenia) in soldiers; this research was of landmark importance in clinical medicine.112 Hestonville Hospital was situated in the West Philadelphia area called Hestonville on Lancaster Avenue near Fifty-second Street and Merion and the Pennsylvania Railroad at the Park Hotel near the Monroe Engine Company. Master Street Hospital was located in a manufacturing building on the northwest corner of Sixth and Master Streets. Islington Lane Hospital was known as the “Smallpox Hospital” because cases of the disease were transferred there from other hospitals. George Street Hospital occupied the building of the Order of American Mechanics at Fourth and George Streets. Fifth Street Hospital was established in the buildings of the Dunlap carriage factory at Fifth and Buttonwood Streets. Race Street Hospital was used temporarily and occupied the National Guards Armory on Race Street below Sixth Street (now the site of the National Constitution Center). Twelfth Street Hospital was located at Twelfth and Buttonwood Streets. Filbert Street Hospital was located at the State Arsenal Building, on the southeast corner of Sixteenth and Filbert Streets (now the site of JFK Plaza). The lower floors of the building were used as a depot for army uniforms. In February 1863, this was converted to a convalescent facility. After the war, it became the Soldiers’ Home. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell’s novel In War Time described this hospital and its operations. South Street Hospital was originally a silk-dyeing factory and was located at Twenty-fourth and South Streets backing onto Naudain Street. This hospital was often called the “stump hospital” because of the large number of patients with amputations. St. Joseph’s Hospital occupied temporary buildings erected on the property of the large Catholic hospital of the same name at Seventeenth Street and Girard Avenue founded in 1849. Catherine Street Hospital was located at Eighth and Catherine Streets. The hospital was conveniently located near the main PW & B Station and was of great service to passing troops. Wood Street Hospital was the site of a former paper factory. It was one of the earliest military hospitals in Philadelphia, located at the northeast corner of Twenty-second and Wood Streets. The Officers’ Hospital, or Camac’s Woods, was located near the corner of Eleventh and Berks Streets. Camac’s Woods Hospital was founded perpendicular to Turner’s Lane on the east side of Broad Street (now on the campus of Temple University). The hospital opened in 1862. It was a facility owned by Dr. Camac, who had converted his own home to a hospital, and was later moved to Twenty-fourth and Chestnut Streets. The Episcopal Hospital was located at Front and York Streets. Cooper Shop Soldiers’ Home and Hospital was located in city-owned buildings at Race and Crown Streets, on the north side of Race Street between Fifth and Fourth Streets, one-third of the way down the street. The street was removed in 1941. This was a home and hospital for debilitated and discharged soldiers who could not get home from Philadelphia. It was founded through the tireless efforts of the volunteer nurse Anna M. Ross, who died on December 22, 1863, from overwork and exhaustion. The Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon Hospital was located near the Refreshment Saloon at the Navy Yard at the foot of Delaware and Washington Avenues, opposite Old Swede’s Church. The hospital backed up to the wall of the navy yard. It accommodated the sick and ailing soldiers of regiments passing through the city. This was one of the first hospitals for wounded and sick soldiers and sailors. During times of great need and large numbers of wounded after great battles, Broad Street churches and firehouses were also used as hospitals.
The U.S. Army Laboratory facility was located on the northeast corner of Sixth and Jefferson Streets in a factory building. It was established under the direction of Surgeon General William A. Hammond in the summer of 1863 to produce medicines and medical supplies for the army and navy under the direction of noted scientist Professor John Maisch. Here a staff of chemists and other experts prepared supplies needed for the medical and surgical requirements of the armed forces.
A contemporary photo of the Citizens’ Volunteer Hospital, funded by voluntary donations. It was located at the northeast corner of Broad and Washington, across the street from the PW & B Depot. GAR Museum Collection.
The “Invalid Corps” was founded by the government and later designated the Veteran Reserve Corps. The corps was recruited from men of military service who were sick or wounded but were still fit for garrison and guard duty. Under the direction of the provost marshal, twelve companies of these troops were formed at the several army hospitals in Philadelphia. Through the efforts of Colonel Richard H. Rush, Lieutenant Colonel George W. Gile, formerly of the 88th PV, was appointed to command. The “Invalid Corps” was composed of two classes: the more able-bodied companies were employed on provost duty and as guards; those in the second class were assigned as hospital clerks, cooks and male nurses.113
