Medical Revolution
“WHEN WE FIRST CAME HERE the streets, on a pleasant afternoon, were filled with convalescent wounded soldiers,” Union soldier Stephen Bogardus Jr. wrote in a letter to his hometown newspaper in late January 1863. His unit, the Maryland-based Purnell Legion, was assigned to guard the important railhead and road junction at Frederick, Md.—assigned to the noncombat assignment in early December 1862.
Remembering his arrival in Frederick, Bogardus wrote of the numerous wounded men he witnessed everywhere in the town of 8,000 residents. “The bandaged head, the empty sleeve, and the stump of a leg, told a tale louder than words could speak,” he continued in his letter to the Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle. “Those who spoke flippantly of patriotism as a mere word should have seen some of those that I have met.”
The convalescing men that Bogardus met on the streets of Frederick were just a few of the thousands still beginning their recovery from serious
