![]() The dead were buried in a cemetery on the site. In its years of operation, the hospital treated 10,593 patients with a mortality figure of 308, Grzyb wrote. Gunshot wounds were treated at the Portsmouth hospital as well it’s assumed that surgeons performed relatively few amputations since most patients arrived with lost limbs from prior operations in field hospitals, according to Grzyb’s book. Typhoid fever - extremely common during the war and transmitted through food or water contaminated by feces - and diarrhea were the most prevalent, Grzyb wrote. Illnesses varied among the men who had fought in the Peninsula Campaign and arrived in Portsmouth. The effort failed and a number of the wounded soldiers from that campaign were transported to the hospital in Portsmouth, Garman said.Īccording to Grzyb’s book, 1,724 patients, including 60 to 70 Confederate prisoners, as well as nine surgeons and 108 male nurses arrived by vessels to the hospital. George McClellan, in charge of the Union army, devised a plan in the early months of 1862 to seize Virginia’s capital city, Richmond. They were soldiers from the Peninsula Campaign in Virginia. The Lovell General Hospital received its first influx of patients on July 6, 1862. Mostly Union soldiers were treated but the hospital accepted some Confederate prisoners of war as well, he said. The hospital was located in the approximate area where the Melville marina is today it consisted of a large summer estate, repurposed, and 14 pavilions serving as temporary barracks, Garman said. Portsmouth’s proximity to the water was advantageous, too, since most of the hospital’s patients arrived by boat. ![]() “It’s hard to really say except there was space available,” Garman said. “It’s a long way to send wounded people,” he said. Garman couldn’t say for sure why a war hospital was established in Portsmouth. It was known by several names, earlier as Portsmouth Grove Hospital and later as the Lovell General Hospital, named in honor of Joseph Lovell, surgeon general of the Army from 1818 to 1836, according to local resident Frank Grzyb’s 2012 book, “Rhode Island’s Civil War Hospital.” One wartime hospital was located in the present-day Melville district, formerly known as Portsmouth Grove. The reasons given for the cause of the war vary among historians, but slavery and a fundamental disagreement over how much power the national government did and should possess are prominent in the Civil War discourse. The Civil War involved numerous battles between Union and Confederate soldiers it began in 1861 and ended in 1865. “Nothing else here on the island, for sure.” “I don’t know of any other ones in Rhode Island,” said Jim Garman, president of the Portsmouth Historical Society. PORTSMOUTH - Though Rhode Island was not a theater for any Civil War battles, a war hospital existed in Portsmouth to aid both Union and Confederate soldiers.
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