Medical Treatment In Prison Camps

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Mar 20, 2010
Location
Ohio
An estimated 61,000 men perished in Civil War prisons. This thread will discuss medical situations that were more or less exclusive to the prison camps. Civil War prisons were poorly managed, horribly overcrowded, and, riddled with disease. Both sides possessed their share of shameful conditions; due mainly to inadequate planning, nutritional ignorance, and nonexistent sanitation. Ultimately, the sheer number of confined men, proved absolutely unmanageable. Every problem that existed in the regimental camps, increased exponentially in the prisons. The hundreds of thousands of men imprisoned simply exceeded either side's ability or will to manage. Leading causes of death included diarrhea, dysentery, scorbutus (scurvy), and various diseases exacerbated by starvation and filthy living conditions.

http://ehistory.osu.edu/uscw/features/medicine/cwsurgeon/statistics.cfm
http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-07112005-193458/unrestricted/Cloyd_dis.pdf
 
The Case of John W. January

"John W. January joined the 14th Illinois Cavalry in June of 1864. He was taken prisoner the next month and spent about 16 months at the prisons in both Andersonville, GA and Florence, SC.

During his imprisonment, malnutrition, scurvy, and gangrene damaged his feet to such an extent that he amputated them himself with a penknife because none of the army doctors would perform the operation. January survived and arrived in David's Island in New York on February 28, 1865 weighing forty-five pounds. He spent seven months under treatment in a hospital and recovered well.

An interview with Valentine Meyers in The Pantagraph in 1906 gave a slightly different version of January's ordeal. Meyers was an army nurse and helped take care of January during his recovery in the hospital in Florence, South Carolina. Meyers said that when January was first brought to the hospital in November of 1864 he was sent to lie in the pen because the hospital was full. Meyers said that January's clothes were stolen from him while he lay unconsious on January 5. Friends got together to provide him with some new clothing.

Meyers claimed that when January asked to have his feet cut off, the army doctor refused and told him that he was going to die anyway and he wanted him to have his feet with him when he died. January managed to convince the doctors to remove his feet. Meyers said that it was an easy task because the gangrene had rotted his bones away."
http://www.minonktalk.com/jjanuary.htm

johnjanuary09.jpg

John W. January with prosthetic legs at a Meeting of
Former Prisoners of War (c. 1880s-90s)

Photo courtesy of the Illinois State Historical Society
 
The confinement was probably a breeding ground for disease. One of my solders died of Rubeola presented by Feb Int. I am not sure what these mean?
Rubeola, common name, measles. The most miserable of conditions were endured by Civil War prisoners. Did this ancestor die in a POW camp?
 
Alton, IL Federal Military Prison

When smallpox infection became alarmingly high in the winter of 1862 and spring of 1863, a quarantine hospital was located on an island across the Mississippi River from the prison. http://www.altonweb.com/history/civilwar/confed/

Sunflower Island
In late 1863, a smallpox epidemic broke out that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of prisoners and guards. The small five-bed prison hospital could not accommodate the many men stricken with the disease, and when the Mayor of Alton heard of the epidemic, he ordered all Alton hospitals and cemeteries off limits to the prison. Until this decree, the prisoners had been buried in a small cemetery three miles north of the prison, in North Alton.
The unsanitary and overcrowded conditions at the prison were causing the disease to spread at an alarming rate, and the warden looked for an area outside the camp to which all infected men and guards could be moved and a new cemetery begun. Sunflower Island (also called Tow Head Island), facing the prison midstream in the Mississippi River, became the site for the smallpox hospital and cemetery for the prison. Guards had to be threatened with court martial to make them report to the island, for smallpox was just as contagious to the guards as it was to the prisoners. Guards and prisoners were buried together, with as many as 60 bodies in a common grave. The number of men who died on the island is not well documented. Prison hospital records show an average of five-to-six deaths per day, with 900 buried on the island. Estimates of the unrecorded deaths and burials on the island range from 1,000 to 5,000. A memorial in the North Alton cemetery lists the names of 1,300 Confederate prisoners of war who died in the prison, which is the number of deaths recorded at the Alton prison by the official records. (In the late 1930s, with the completion of the Alton Lock and Dam No. 26, the island cemetery disappeared under the new, higher level of the Mississippi called Alton Lake.) http://www.lib.niu.edu/2007/ih030708.html
 
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