![civil war hospital ambuleses civil war hospital ambuleses](http://abriefhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Slide30.jpg)
![civil war hospital ambuleses civil war hospital ambuleses](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/0be97933-dc50-4530-9e1e-3a999e2fd6ec_1.f278b26900344ff38bb617c6113f8530.jpeg)
General Hospital, also known as Satterlee U.S. These hospitals were also overwhelmed, leading the Army to create the mammouth West Philadelphia U.S. The federal government responded to the crush of arriving casualties in Philadelphia by creating 24 new Army hospitals here in existing buildings adapted for this purpose. Soon a branch of the Sanitary Commission was operating in Philadelphia. Sanitary Commission, which generated private funds to outfit hospital trains and ships and provide supplies to the patients. The horror stories of casualty abuse and neglect in the recent Crimean War and the example of Britain’s Florence Nightingale in alleviating their suffering galvanized a group of New York women to form the U.S. By the war’s end, over 11,000 doctors had served or were serving the Union Army, the great majority in general hospitals away from the front lines. Army Medical Corps consisted of an octogenarian surgeon general, 30 surgeons and 83 assistant surgeons, 27 of whom immediately resigned to “go South,” thus leaving the Corps with only 87 physicians. | Image: Philadelphia in the Civil War, Frank Taylor, 1913 This war would ultimately claim 600,000 lives, with 30 percent of Union casualties attributable to battle injuries.ĭrawing by Frank Taylor of the Southern & Western Station of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad at Broad and Prime Streets (Washington Avenue). Philadelphia, astride the Union’s main railroad corridor leading southward to the Virginia battlefields, soon found its civilian hospitals overwhelmed with injured men–soldiers who had recently boarded the railcars of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad at its Southern and Western Station, Broad and Prime Streets (Washington Avenue, today) to the loud cheers and stirring martial music sending them off to war. When the Civil War began, its opposing sides assumed that the war would be of short duration until certain victory was achieved, a misperception common to armed conflicts.
![civil war hospital ambuleses civil war hospital ambuleses](https://www.civilwarmed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/CW-WWI-Ambulance-Twitter-e1528373622104-1.jpg)
Taylor would later claim in his 1913 book Philadelphia in the Civil War that the city’s medical reputation was already well established by then as a result of this wartime experience. Patriotic physicians gained their knowledge and honed their skills treating the 157,000 soldiers and sailors who were cared for in the city’s hospitals. One reason why Philadelphia enjoys its world wide reputation as a center of medical education and practice can be traced back to the Civil War.