Indeed, the doctors who attended patients in the Washington Infirmary were the select few who ran the medical faculty at Columbian College and used the Infirmary for clinical instruction for their students. Doctors served their paying patients in the patients' homes, even for those who could not pay very much, and so few practitioners had spent any time in hospital wards at all by 1861. Because prewar charity hospitals were devoted to the poor and were places of last resort for those who had no friends or family capable of supporting them through their illnesses or injuries, no respectable citizen wanted to end up in one. The county funded these institutions through taxes, while citizens funded the Infirmary through charitable donations, although it may also have received county or city funds for treating the local poor. Elizabeth's), where the city sent the insane poor who could not be managed in their homes or at the almshouse. Washington, like other American communities, had two other institutions where doctors dispensed medical treatment: the poor house, or almshouse, where the city sent indigent citizens and had doctors take care of basic medical needs, and the local insane asylum (St.
Civil war hospital conditions free#
The Washington Infirmary was typical of the hospitals that graced antebellum cities large enough to have civic support for a place where the deserving sick poor could receive free or very inexpensive medical aid.
In the face of the war's first casualties, the military co-opted space in the Washington Infirmary, the only building in the city devoted to general medical care, and it became-at the stroke of a pen-the first military hospital established in the Civil War.
When a Baltimore mob wounded some of the first recruits on their way to Washington DC in May 1861, several were cared for on the spot, while others were transported to the nation's capital.
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