Confederate Death Cert from Nashville Hospital 1862

TerryB

Lt. Colonel
Joined
Dec 7, 2008
Location
Nashville TN
Cameron.jpg
 
A. Cameron was a member of the 9th Ark Infantry. I'm finding lots of graves in the Confederate Circle Mount Olivet Cemetery (Nashville) of Confederates from Arkansas and Texas who died in Nashville hospitals in late 1861 and early 1862. They were all stationed at Bowling Green, Ky. Sickness was probably made worse as cold weather set in. This is the first death cert I found. These men were originally buried in Nashville's Old City Cemetery, but moved after the war, sometime around 1869, when Mount Olivet's Confederate Circle was established.
 
I've seen very few CSRs of Confederates who died of disease after Feb 1862. I'm beginning to believe that if you survived the first few months of the war without dying of disease, you were probably immune to whatever was going around. Quite a few cases of measles have turned up. The standard pattern seems to be that these men took sick in camp in Kentucky. They were usually from Arkansas or Texas, and were usually sent to Bowling Green first, then to Nashville. The records probably survived because Nashville surrendered without a shot being fired. Why so many from the Trans-Mississippi? Maybe they had no immunity to the diseases picked up in camp over the winter in Kentucky, but I suspect the real reason is that Arkansas and Texas were too far away to send a body home. So far I haven't found any officers.
 
I just came across Pvt Richard G. Phelan of the 22nd Ala Inf. He was wounded on Dec 15, 1864, at the Battle of Nashville and fell into Union hands. Transferred to a Union Army hospital on the 16th, he died on Jan 6, 1865. He has 2 copies of his burial records. Cause of death was exhaustion due to gunshot wound which fractured his sacrum. The missile was a cannon ball, which I think was probably canister. His treatment was described as "opiates, stimulants, simple dressings, no gangrene." His burial records even show his next of kin in Alabama.
 
I've seen very few CSRs of Confederates who died of disease after Feb 1862. I'm beginning to believe that if you survived the first few months of the war without dying of disease, you were probably immune to whatever was going around. Quite a few cases of measles have turned up. The standard pattern seems to be that these men took sick in camp in Kentucky. They were usually from Arkansas or Texas, and were usually sent to Bowling Green first, then to Nashville. The records probably survived because Nashville surrendered without a shot being fired. Why so many from the Trans-Mississippi? Maybe they had no immunity to the diseases picked up in camp over the winter in Kentucky, but I suspect the real reason is that Arkansas and Texas were too far away to send a body home. So far I haven't found any officers.
"Rheumatic fever has decreased since the civil war time when a so many men experienced it. The ones who had it probably had high-grade cases so it was identified, but probably a much greater percentage had lower grade cases and it was thought to be the "flu" diarrhea, headaches, back pain, or a pneumonia like disease. It is a great chameleon! Information indicates that 160,000 soldiers in the civil war had acute rheumatism (which is an old name for rheumatic fever), rheumatic fever, infectious arthritis, or gout. There is a question about, infectious arthritis, but people with rheumatic fever have an infectous fever and if it is severe they have arthritis, so it may be another name for rheumatic fever. 12,000 troops were discharged for chronic pheuistic fever and reactive arthritis. That is not a current word, but it seems to be a pulmonary disease with reactive arthritis and that kind of a presentation could be a rheumatic fever-like disease also, but chronic and held on for some time. Sir William Osler, in his famous text, "Principles and Practices of Medicine, indicates that scarlet fever (similar to rheumatic fever) could be high-grade, subacute or less than subacute and chronic. Rheumatic fever can also present highly variably. Rheumatic and Scarlet fever are the same disease except the Streptococcus pyogenes that causes scarlet fever can excrete erythrotoxin A B or C and so a more or less, specific rash can be developed." http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_caused_rheumatic_fever_in_the_civil_war

Looks as though this research comes from our very own Lnwlf! Thank you sir!
 
I also came across "pyaemia," as a cause of death---basically a staph infection. It was a death sentence before antibiotics.
 
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