The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 7: Prisons and Hospitals.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

[348] list of articles which the Government would undertake to provide for the inmates of the hospitals, was also issued by orders of the surgeon-general, embracing many things essential to their comfort, for the supply of which the hospital fund had been hitherto the only and most precarious source. Hospital clothing was also furnished to the patients under the new regime. As a means of securing the most competent men for the medical service of the army, he recognized the board of examination, and insisted upon a higher standard of attainment on the part of the candidate. He established also a new and complete system of hospital reports, which was designed to embody not merely a formal and barren statement of the number of patients in the hospitals and of those who were discharged or died, but also such facts concerning their condition as would constitute valuable material for a medical and surgical history of the war. . . . He instituted at Washington an army medical museum, in which was collected and arranged a vast number of specimens from the different hospitals, illustrating the nature of the particular diseases to which soldiers are liable, and the character of the wounds which are inflicted by the new missiles of war. . . .

But the great central want of the system, which, if left unsupplied, all the other improvements suggested by the surgeon-general would have proved of little value, was the want of proper hospital buildings. Fortunately for the completion of the circle of his plans, the necessary cooperation of those officers of the Government outside of the Medical Department who were charged with the erection of hospitals, was at last obtained, and a large number were constructed on a vast scale in different parts of the country according to the pavilion system.

General Hammond was embarrassed by the fact that shortly after his appointment he, like his predecessor, incurred the displeasure of the Secretary of War. This culminated in the fall of 1863 in his removal from duty, after being found technically guilty of certain charges by a court martial. This led to dismissal from the service. In 1878, he had his case reopened and the evidence reexamined, and on this basis Congress reversed his sentence and placed him on the retired list of the army with the grade from which he had unjustly been deposed.

On the removal from office of Surgeon-General Hammond, on September 3, 1863, Colonel Joseph K. Barnes, medical inspector-general, was appointed acting surgeon-general, and this appointment was made permanent by his being commissioned surgeon-general on August 22, 1864. He was born in Philadelphia, in 1817, was educated at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, and at the time of his provisional selection had completed twenty-three years of service in the Medical Department of the army. He had served in various Indian wars, and actively participated in nearly all of the great battles in the War with Mexico. His experience stood him in good stead, and during the remainder of the Civil War the affairs of the surgeon-general's office were conducted with the highest efficiency, and the transition from war to peace was accomplished without a jar.

It is only fair to General Barnes' predecessors to say that they turned over to him a medical administrative machine which was working smoothly in all its parts, however loudly it had creaked under the stress of its emergency creation and development in the earlier years of the struggle. His efforts were greatly aided by the fact that he succeeded in retaining the friendship of Secretary Stanton, who thereafter omitted nothing that could conduce to the extension of the facilities and efficiency of the Medical Department. Surgeon-General Barnes continued in office for nineteen years, carrying out not only the well-devised plans of his predecessors, but others of his own conception. To him was due much of the development of the medical work of the army, the vesting of the control of general hospitals and hospital camps in the Medical Department, the inclusion of medical officers in the brevet commissions given at the end of the war, the development of the great Army Medical Museum and the superb library of the surgeon-general's office, the compilation of the medical and surgical records of the Civil War, and many other movements which redounded to the welfare of the sick, the efficiency of the troops, and the advantage of American military medicine. It fell to his lot to share in the care of two murdered Presidents, he being the first surgeon called to the bedside of Abraham Lincoln and, sixteen years later, summoned to assist in the treatment of James A. Garfield.