The USSC Stretcher

kyle.dalton

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Oct 3, 2019
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Frederick, MD
Metroplitan Fair for the U.S. Sanitary Commission brochure, 1864, Smithsonian.png

Detail from "Metropolitan Fair for the U.S. Sanitary Commission brochure," 1864, Smithsonian collection
It's been a long time since I've posted one of these examinations of stretcher models in use during the Civil War, so I think it's time to get back to it.

The U.S. Sanitary Commission is, of course, famous for providing medical and leisure material for soldiers at the front. When it came to stretchers, they developed their own model that was intended to address some of the problems inherent with the standard issue Satterlee and Halstead models. With fixed poles, both the Satterlee and Halstead took up considerable space and were liable to breaking. Both were also hefty, averaging between 23 and 26 pounds. The average soldier weighed around 143 pounds. This means that the stretcher bearers would carry an average of about 96 pounds each.

To address these issues, the USSC adopted a stretcher model that hinged at the center to fold up for easier transport and weighed less (though I have yet to find solid numbers on its exact weight).

The medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion (1861-65) (Volume 2, Part 3) page...jpg

The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion,Volume 2, Part 3, page 925

Writing in 1869, the British Surgeon General Thomas Longmore in his work A Treatise on the Transport of Sick and Wounded (page 140) confused the USSC stretcher with the Halstead, announcing that they were produced in huge quantities. In fact, they were probably pretty rare. Both Longmore and the authors of The Medical and Surgical History agreed that the USSC stretcher was "too fragile for the hard usage of actual warfare." Longmore may only have devoted space to this model in his book because he wrongly believed it was more widely used than it was. Aside from the above illustration, the authors of The Medical and Surgical History give this model only one sentence in their monumental 3,000 page collection.

The fragility of the USSC seems to have doomed it both in how many were produced and how many survived. I know of only one original example that still exists. It just happens to be on display at our Frederick, Maryland location!


Assistant Surgeon George C. Douglass of the 1st New York Cavalry owned this piece, and you can see that he put the names of his cities on the stretcher itself. This seems to confirm the assertion by Longmore who, after a litany of flaws with stretchers of this type, granted that while these types were useless in the field they were useful "in the second class; indeed, stretchers intended for use in hospital wagons, and those for other purposes connected with permanent hospitals, are almost universally of the framed kind." Douglass probably used this stretcher in a permanent or semi-permanent hospital setting, rather than for the evacuation of combat wounded.
 
Great to see you back posting @kyle.dalton A great thread on the US Sanitary Commission stretcher. Amazing that there is only one known surviving example - and we are able to see it - direct from the National Museum of Civil War Medicine! Thanks for sharing it with us.
 
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