Let me specialize a visit I made to the collection of barrack-like one-story edifices, Campbell hospital, out on the flats, at the end of the then horse railway route, on Seventh street. There is a long building appropriated to each ward. Let us go into ward 6. It contains to-day, I should judge, eighty or a hundred patients, half sick, half wounded. The edifice is nothing but boards, well whitewash’d inside, and the usual slender-framed iron bedsteads, narrow and plain. You walk down the central passage, with a row on either side, their feet towards you, and their heads to the wall. There are fires in large stoves, and the prevailing white of the walls is reliev’d by some ornaments, stars, circles, &c., made of evergreens. The view of the whole edifice and occupants can be taken at once, for there is no partition. You may hear groans or other sounds of unendurable suffering from two or three of the cots, but in the main there is quiet—almost a painful absence of demonstration; but the pallid face, the dull’d eye, and the moisture on the lip, are demonstration enough. Most of these sick or hurt are evidently young fellows from the country, farmers’ sons, and such like. Look at the fine large frames, the bright and broad countenances, and the many yet lingering proofs of strong constitution and physique. Look at the patient and mute manner of our American wounded as they lie in such a sad collection; representatives from all New England, and from New York, and New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—indeed from all the States and all the cities—largely from the west. Most of them are entirely without friends or acquaintances here—no familiar face, and hardly a word of judicious sympathy or cheer, through their sometimes long and tedious sickness, or the pangs of aggravated wounds.

The site where Campbell Hospital once stood is Le Droit Park, near 6th and Florida Avenue, in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The area is named after Col. Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the all-black Massachusetts 54th Regiment, famously depicted in the movie Glory.  After the war, Campbell Hospital was converted into a hospital for African Americans and renamed Freedman’s Hospital. Today, the African American Civil War Memorial, completed in 1997, stands nearby. | Conditions at hospitals like Campbell were dismal: antiseptics were unknown, and mortality was far higher from disease and wounds than from bullets. Figures give a good idea of sanitary conditions in the mid-1800s. A 1863 inspection of Union hospitals found 589 satisfactory and 303 bad or very bad, and of the Union’s 360,000 casualties, only 67,000 were killed in action.