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.

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‘ [82] of oilcloth, coats, and blankets stretched upon sticks. The tents and huts were not arranged according to any order, and there was in most parts of the enclosure scarcely room for two men to walk abreast between the tents and huts. . . . Masses of corn bread, bones, old rags, and filth of every description were scattered around or accumulated in large piles. If one might judge from the large pieces of corn bread scattered about in every direction on the ground, the prisoners were either very lavishly supplied with this article of diet or else this kind of food was not relished by them.’ The stream was not strong enough to carry away the filth and the swampy lowland became indescribably foul.

Each day the dead from the stockade were carried out by their fellow prisoners and deposited upon the ground under a bush arbor just outside of the southwestern gate. From thence they were carried in carts to the burying ground one-quarter of a mile northwest of the prison. The dead were buried without coffins, side by side, in trenches four feet deep.

The hospital itself was a group of worn-out tents, many of them leaky and some of them without sides. There were no bunks and but little straw. Hundreds of the patients lay upon the bare ground. Their food differed little from that of the prisoners within the stockade though the surgeon in charge was able to obtain small quantities of flour and arrowroot. The prevalent diseases were scurvy, diarrhea, dysentery, and hospital gangrene.

Doctor W. J. W. Kerr, who was a member of the medical staff at Andersonville during a considerable portion of its existence as a prison, has advanced the theory that the disease which they diagnosed as a form of scurvy was in reality pellagra, declaring that the symptoms of this recently identified disease fit precisely hundreds of cases he observed in Andersonville. But whether scurvy or pellagra, the effects were horrible. Here Doctor Jones says, ‘ From the crowded condition, filthy habits, bad diet, and dejected, depressed condition of ’