New on the Personal Bookshelf--- Chimborazo: Confederacy's Largest Hospital

Chimborazo: The Confederacy's Largest Hospital, Carol C. Green, University of Tennessee Press, 200 pp., notes, bibliography, index, illustrations, paperback, $21.95.

A long time on the wishlist, Chimborazo was added to the personal bookshelf when I finally got to Chimborazo Hospital's site in Richmond. While staying at Williamsburg, VA my GPS spoke to me: "Richmond is onlyh 45 minutes away!" So the next day on to Richmond's American Civil War Center, The Tredegar Ironworks, Chimborazo Hospital, and the Edgar Allan Poe Museum! Blue skies and 45 degrees and cruise control!

The former headquarters building for the NPS's headquarters for the Richmond Battlefield Parks, the building marking the Chimborazo Hospital site did not exist during the Civil War. Though small, the building has a 2001 film and a very fine diorama of the hospital. Several of the items in the bookstore begged to be taken to my house but I limited myself to one but wrote down three titles to add to the wishlist. The Confederate States Medical Journal, published in 1864 and 1865 is once again in print and is priced at $95.

"Chimborazo covers the organization of the Confederate Medical Department of Chimborazo Hospital, staff leader Dr. James B. McCaw, the surgeons, staff and patients. Medical treatment and supplies is covered as is the closing of the hospital. The author offers an evaluation of the hospital.

Opened in October of 1861, the hospital covered over forty acres and operated between 75 and 80 wards grouped into five separate divisions Each ward was a hut made of whitewashed pine boards that housed up to forty patients, giving the entire hospital a capacity of over 3,000. Every division had its own laundry, kitchen and bathhouse, and a central bakery and dairy serviced the entire facility, making Chimborazo one of the Confederacy's best-equipped hospitals as well as one of the largest. Directly outside the grounds were the J.D. Goodman brewery and the city's Oakwood Cemetery.

More than 76,000 Confederate sick and wounded were treated here. Chimborazo had a patient mortality rate of 20 percent; dismal by today's standards, but quite good in terms of nineteenth century medicine, before the days of antibiotics, antiseptic surgery and widespread understanding of germ theory. Indeed, it was viewed by Confederate leaders as one of the finest hospitals their new nation possessed.

Chimborazo hospital was innovative, pioneering several new techniques in medicine. Its use of separate wards allowed patients to be grouped together by state - a forerunner of the ward system in modern hospitals." (1)

(1) Richmond National Battlefield---Chimborazo

Forthcoming---The Great Escape, February 1864

Libby Prison Breakout:The Daring Escape from the Notorious Civil War Prison, Joseph Wheelan, Public Affairs Press, 352 pages, $26.95. February 2010

In warehouses along the Virginia waterfront, Union prisoners of war were held in desperate squalor—freezing, malnourished and subjected to hateful mistreatment. Among the worst of these makeshift prisons was Libby, a former tobacco warehouse where 1,200 Union officers slept without blankets on the bare floor and subsisted on scraps of cornbread and rancid meat. Many died, most endured; the most audacious plotted their escape. Joseph Wheelan, a prolific biographer and former AP editor, recounts the improbable tale of 109 courageous officers in Libby Prison Breakout—the first book to chronicle this amazing escape in depth. Charting the transformation of stately Richmond, Virginia, from antebellum gentility to wartime industrial center, Wheelan depicts the citizens’ attempts to cope with mounting privations as the Confederate Army commandeered Richmond’s food, clothing and goods. Martial law, protests, food riots and harsh countermeasures nurtured among Richmond’s populace a seething hatred of “the Yankee,” an enmity that would color the treatment of prisoners from the North. With prisoner exchanges at a standstill, Union POWs could scarcely hope for a timely release. And while the Union Army’s treatment of Confederate POWs was constrained by the Lieber Code (an antecedent to the Geneva Convention), no such code of conduct shielded Union prisoners from a prison system that “at times seemed expressly designed to induce suffering.” The often highly educated officers proved resourceful at coping with their captivity, but disease, lice, cruelty, overcrowding and sheer boredom made escape an increasingly urgent prospect. In November 1863, two recently captured Union officers, Colonel Thomas Ellwood Rose and Major A.G. Hamilton, began to dig a 55-foot tunnel under Libby Prison. Leading 107 of their fellow captives, they fled in the chill of winter through the heart of the Confederate homeland, with Rebel soldiers in hot pursuit. Their successful escape lifted Northern morale, and their subsequent Congressional testimony, detailing their cruel and degrading treatment, led to the imposition of harsh measures against Rebel POWs. Drawing from primary sources including letters, journals, prison records and even issues of the prisoners’ weekly “newspaper,” Wheelan makes this little-known historical event feel palpable and current. The author does not flinch from depicting the ghastly human cost of war, nor does he give short shrift to the tale’s colorful characters—such as Col. Abel Streight, a man of imposing physical presence, formidable intellect and larger-than-life personality; or the one-woman “spy ring” of Elizabeth Van Lew. Libby Prison Breakout is a valuable contribution to Civil War historiography, and a richly rewarding reading experience.

Joseph Wheelan, a former Associated Press reporter and editor, is the author of Mr. Adams's Last Crusade, Invading Mexico, Jefferson's War, and Jefferson's Vendetta. He lives in Cary, North Carolina.

Source: Public Affairs Press and History Book Club