A page from a patient ledger at Chimborazo Hospital recorded during the Civil War (Image courtesy Richmond National Battlefield Park)
Jean Hemphill’s great-great-grandfathers served in the Confederate Army, and one died at Chimborazo Hospital. Today, the hospital is the site of a Richmond National Battlefield Park Visitor Center and the Chimborazo Medical Museum, and Hemphill is a volunteer with the Chimborazo Patient Project, an ongoing initiative to decipher the ledgers that recorded the names of soldiers convalescing there. From October 1861 to April 1865, the hospital received 77,000 Confederate injured and ailing.
The project began in May 2018, and the work is done by volunteers at home. The sheer number of entries, and the difficulty of deciphering the clerical cursive from National Archives microfilm, make the task daunting. The microfilm can obscure names in the gutter of the ledgers, and the clerks, using pens dipped in ink, sometimes misspelled names or wrote in illegible script.
National Park ranger and historian Mike Gorman takes on these endeavors with the enthusiasm of a diver seeking deep-sea treasure. This is about data that will yield definitive information — for example, how many soldiers arrived at Chimborazo from Henrico County or Atlanta.
The ledgers offer details of what brought the soldiers to Chimborazo, whether battlefield injury or disease — the biggest killer in 19th-century warfare.
Besides the challenge of deciphering harried handwriting, terminology can sometimes provide little to go on. Gorman recalls one soldier who was afflicted by “melancholia.”
“Was that post-traumatic stress?” he wonders. “Or did he have a bad case of diarrhea and was moping around?”
For Hemphill, the names are more than statistics.
“We all feel a connection to the patients,” she says. “I can be transcribing a page from left to right when I read the fate as ‘died.’ I think we all stop for a second and mourn that soldier.”
Hemphill’s ancestor died at Chimborazo of “remit.fever.” “That usually means a fever that is ongoing with no obvious cause,” she says.
