Medical museum opens at Antietam

SHARPSBURG, Md. — Visitors to the Antietam National Battlefield often come knowing about the deaths. Starting this spring, they can learn how lives were saved by modern medical concepts pioneered at the Civil War site.

Efficient systems for sorting and transporting patients and managing medical supplies can be traced to a red-brick farmhouse at the battlefield’s eastern edge where Union surgeon Jonathan Letterman oversaw the care of thousands of soldiers wounded on the bloodiest day of the war.

The building, which opens to the public Thursday as the Pry House Field Hospital Museum, is run by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in nearby Frederick and achieves a long-held goal of the National Park Service.

“We’ve never been able to do an adequate education on the medical care that was here,” park Superintendent John W. Howard said.

Letterman was director of medicine for the Army of the Potomac. He is known as the father of modern battlefield medicine for revamping the Army Medical Corps. The blueprint for the reorganization was his report on the Battle of Antietam, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, fought Sept. 17, 1862, on farm fields about 72 miles northwest of the District. There were nearly 23,000 casualties — including about 3,700 killed and 17,300 wounded.

Letterman prepared for the 12-hour engagement by setting up field-dressing stations next to the battlefield, field hospitals in nearby barns or houses, and large hospitals in surrounding towns. Horse-drawn wagons driven by the nation’s first ambulance corps carried the wounded to the field-dressing stations, where bandages and tourniquets were applied and patients were sorted according to the severity of their injuries. His triage system for sorting patients is still used today, and his multitiered treatment concept is the model for modern emergency care.

“If you see an ambulance racing down the street, … if you’re ever in a hospital, what happened on this battlefield … affects your health care,” said George Wunderlich, executive director of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.