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Birds eye view of Lincoln General Hospital, Washington, D.C., seen from the rear, 1865.
From Reports on the extent and nature of the materials available for the preparation of a medical and surgical history of the rebellion (Philadelphia, 1865).

The Lincoln General Hospital, a pavilion-type hospital, was active from December, 1862, until August, 1865, and located about a mile from the Capitol building in Washington.  Over 21,000 troops and prisoners were admitted over the course of the war.

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Photograph of man with resectioned shoulder joint,
Photographs of Wounded Soldiers, 1864.
Gift of Benjamin Shreve Peirson to the Boston Medical Library, 1972.

This photograph is part of a small collection of case histories of Civil War soldiers, wounded in conflicts in Virginia, treated at the Lincoln General Hospital, and sent to Dr. Edward Brooks Peirson (1820-1874) of Salem, Massachusetts.

Edward Brooks Peirson volunteered his services to assist the wounded at Fredericksburg after the Battle of the Wilderness.  According to his obituary, “It was during this self-sacrificing service that he contracted disease which first permanently weakened his naturally vigorous constitution and at last added his name to the number of those who, during our late civil war, secured our national life by yielding up their own.”

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Excised head of humerus, 1861-1863
Bone; metal; wood
Excised and donated by Algernon Coolidge, M.D., 1863
Warren Anatomical Museum, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine [WAM 06536]

This amputated head of the left humerus was excised from a soldier in the American Civil War. He was shot at the battle of Fredericksburg. The amputation was performed sometime after the injury by Algernon Coolidge and was successful. The soldier was found working at the Charlestown Naval Yard in 1865.

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James Gowran,
Photographs of Wounded Soldiers, 1864.
Gift of Benjamin Shreve Peirson to the Boston Medical Library, 1972.

James Gowran, a private in the 59th New York Volunteers, had his arm amputated in the field after the Battle of Petersburg. He was treated at the Lincoln. This photograph, also from the Peirson collection, depicts the gangrenous stump.  Gowran recovered. 

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A photograph of Silas Weir Mitchell, circa 1889.

Drs. S. Weir Mitchell, George Read Morehouse, and William W. Keen were in charge of the wards for neurological diseases and injuries in the Turner’s Lane Hospital in Philadelphia.  They distilled information from some 120 cases to produce the manual of treatment, Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of Nerves (1864).  “Among them were representatives of every conceivable form of nerve injury,—from shot and shell, from sabre cuts, contusions, and dislocations.  So complete was the field of study, that it was not uncommon to find at one time in the wards four or five cases of gunshot injuries of any single large nerve.  It thus happened that phenomena which one day seemed rare and curious, were seen anew in other cases the next day, and grew commonplace as our patients became numerous.”

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Photograph of S. Weir Mitchell with a Civil War veteran in the clinic at the Infirmary for Nervous Diseases, in Philadelphia, January, 1902.
Donated by Guy Hinsdale, M.D., to the Library of Harvard Medical School, 1915.

This photograph shows Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, at his clinic at the Infirmary for Nervous Diseases in Philadelphia, examing a patient who had a gunshot wound of the median nerve.