Sept. 11th, 1861.
Where do you think I am writing? In the Patent Office, where we heard the other day that a large number of sick men had been brought from the 19th Indiana regiment. We found them in a dirty and forlorn condition and have come to do what we can. The whole regiment, nearly, is down with sickness from great exposure when they first arrived, they say. The assistant-surgeon of the regiment and the matron are here all the time, and a number of Washington women come in to help every day.
“One of the first extemporized hospitals of the war was in the top story of the Patent Office, where the 19th Indiana regiment was brought, nearly every man of them. The great, unfinished lumber room was set aside for their use, and rough tables—I can’t call them beds—were knocked together from pieces of the scaffolding. These beds were so high that it was impossible to reach them, and we had to make them up with brooms, sweeping off the mattresses, and jerking the sheets as smooth as we could. About six men could be accommodated on one table. These ran the whole length of the long room, while on the stacks of marble slabs, which were some day to be the floor, we spread mattresses, and put the sickest men. As the number increased, camp-beds were set up between the glass cases in the outer room, and we alternated —typhoid fever, cog-wheels and patent churns —typhoid fever, balloons and mouse-traps (how many ways of catching mice there are!)—typhoid fever, locomotives, water-wheels, clocks,—and a general nightmare of machinery.
Here, for weeks, went on a sort of hospital picnic. We scrambled through with what we had to do. The floors were covered with lime dust, shavings, nails, and carpenters’ scraps. We had the rubbish taken up with shovels, and stacked in barrels at one end of the ward. The men were crowded in upon us; the whole regiment soaked with a malignant, malarial fever, from exposure, night after night, to drenching rains, without tents. There was so much of this murderous, blundering want of prevision and provision, in the first few months of the war—and is now, for that matter.
Gradually, out of the confusion came some system and order. Climbing up to the top of the Patent Office with each loaf of bread was found not to be an amusing occupation, and an arrangement of pulleys was made out of one of the windows, and any time through the day, barrels of water, baskets of vegetables and great pieces of army beef, might be seen crawling slowly up the marble face of the building.
Here, for weeks, we worked among these men, cooking for them, feeding them, washing them, sliding them along on their tables, while we climbed up on something and made up their beds with brooms, putting the same powders down their throats with the same spoon, all up and down what seemed half a mile of uneven floor;—coaxing back to life some of the most unpromising,—watching the youngest and best die.
I remember rushing about from apothecary to apothecary, in the lower part of the city, one Sunday afternoon, to get, in a great hurry, mustard, to help bring life into a poor Irishman, who called me Betty in his delirium, and, to our surprise, got well, went home, and at once married the Betty we had saved him for.
By-and-by the regiment got through with the fever, improvements came into the long ward, cots took the place of the tables, and matting covered the little hills of the floor. The hospital for the 19th Indiana became the “U. S. General Hospital at the Patent Office,” and the “volunteers for emergencies” took up their saucepans and retired.”
