![]() ![]() ![]() "But since I came here there's no doubt in my mind. ![]() "I always believed in ghosts," says Angel May, the head administrator at the Exchange Hotel Civil War Medical Museum in Gordonsville, Va. Built in 1859, the museum once served as a Confederate hospital. Some say they’ve seen a woman’s shadow toward the back of the museum, the so-called Shadow of Death.Īrtifacts on display at the Exchange Hotel Civil War Medical Museum in Gordonsville, Va. People have also reported hearing scratching sounds. He adds that he has heard “weird things,” including “a sound like a dragging table above me when no one else was in the building.” The museum was the site of embalming services during the war and is considered the most haunted building in Frederick, according to Wynn. ![]() Some 8,000 of the more than 17,000 soldiers who were wounded in that battle arrived here for treatment.īut if the war’s history isn’t enough of a draw, maybe a potential ghost sighting is. Then a city of 8,000, Frederick became the go-to spot for soldiers recovering from Antietam. “They were literally pooping themselves to death,” Wynn explains. The men would go to the bathroom in the same waters they drank from, one reason the biggest cause of death in the war wasn’t gunfire but infection and sicknesses such as dysentery and typhoid fever. “Imagine the smells!” says Wynn, leading us toward a diorama of camp life, depicting a tent and soldiers, including one kneeling at a stream. And we learn that while most soldiers did have the luxury of pre-amputation painkillers, the war was still a horrific test of physical endurance. He shows us such artifacts as amputation kits, the mummified arm, photos of terribly wounded soldiers, descriptions of how an organized hospital system (there were 53 receiving hospitals in Virginia alone) developed and Clara Barton’s camp bed. “We have these kind of cartoonish views of what medicine was like then,” says my group’s tour guide, Jake Wynn, “but medical care was merciful compared to what it was like 30 years before.” Anesthesia was introduced in the 1840s, and, contrary to popularly held notions, about 95 percent of soldiers had the luxury of chloroform or ether to at least lightly knock them out during surgeries. It inspired the first real use of triage in this country and widespread use of painkillers. (Yacouba Tanou/For The Washington Post )Īs the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, in Frederick, Md., makes clear, the war was a crucial turning point for medicine. Depending on your level of fear factor, there’s this bonus, too: Dead 19th-century soldiers, at least to hear some museum employees tell it, have unusually restless souls.Ī display depicting an amputation at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Md. And this region, home to some of the war’s biggest battles, has some fascinating places to learn about them. The period was marked by both stunning ignorance, at least in retrospect, and wide-reaching innovations for treating large groups of people in a more systematic way. Daniel Sickles's cannon-fire-damaged leg bone and President Lincoln's skull fragments. My interest was piqued years ago during a visit to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, which is full of Civil War-era artifacts such as Union Gen. It's just that the drama of the Civil War, which can seem so abstract and dry in history books, becomes grippingly real when I'm brought face to face (or face to bullet-cracked skull) with the suffering it caused. Honestly, it's not the gore that I'm into. That includes macabre stories of early medicine's misguided stabs at healing - think dirty sponges used to clean wounds, cringe-worthy bloodletting tools and tales of horrid disfigurements from poorly treated illnesses. I've always been mesmerized by the grittier details of our mind-bogglingly bloody Civil War (about 620,000 dead). ![]()
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