Civil War Pharmacy by Flannery Michael A.;Humphreys Margaret;

Author:Flannery, Michael A.;Humphreys, Margaret; [Flannery, Michael A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

CHAPTER NINE

NAVAL PHARMACY

Comparatively speaking, only a small number of historians have paid attention to naval aspects of the Civil War and fewer still to the medical aspects on river and sea. The sheer lack of available secondary literature forces one to do considerable diving into primary sources to uncover the story. Nevertheless, such efforts are repaid by revealing the indefatigable efforts of men at all levels who attempted to provide adequate care to the sailors under their charge. What emerges is a story in which the production and distribution of medicines by the U.S. Navy forms an interesting if less studied aspect of pharmacy during the Civil War.

Medicine and medical care were decentralized components of the U.S. Navy until 1842 when the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED) was established, but with more centralized control came better coordination of function; by 1854, for example, with a more standardized “Table of Allowances” for medicines and medical supplies in place, medical supply was no longer slave to the individual preferences of shipboard surgeons. When war broke out in 1861, medical care in the U.S. Navy was provided by three categories of physicians: assistant surgeons (on average six years in grade), passed assistant surgeons (fourteen years of service), and surgeons (on average twenty-seven years of service).1 William Whelan was the chief of BUMED. At its height the Union navy had a total of 463 medical officers in 1864, a number that would fall off to 425 the following year.2

The Confederate States Navy Department offers an arresting contrast. For example, from October 1863 to October 1864, all five naval hospitals at Richmond, Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, and Mobile admitted just under two thousand patients combined. The army hospital at Chimborazo, Virginia, alone admitted more than three thousand patients in just six months during the same period.3 Interestingly enough, in 1863, the so-called high-water mark of the Confederacy, William A. W. Spotswood, chief of the Confederacy’s Office of Medicine and Surgery, the South’s counterpart to Whelan and BUMED, was able to report twenty-three surgeons on active duty, although he recommended the number be raised to thirty. While there were fifteen passed assistant surgeons, Spotswood noted that only eleven had been appointed and one of these died, so the effective number was reduced to ten. Given the current size of the Confederate navy, Spotswood thought that the anticipated ninety-three medical officers “of all grades” would be “sufficient for all the purposes of our present Naval Establishment,” but not if it were even moderately increased in size.4

Spotswood had little to worry about. One perceptive naval historian has noted that by training and inclination, Jefferson Davis’s “strategic thoughts were strictly continental and landlocked.”5 As such the Confederate navy’s highest enlistments barely reached forty-five hundred and more normally was likely under three thousand men, the equivalent of less than three regiments.6 The entire Confederate fleet comprised only 113 commissioned vessels along with 3 torpedo boats, the Hornet, Scorpion, and Wasp.7 By comparison the creaky 90-ship Union navy of 1861 quickly

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