Chimborazo Hospital
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Chimborazo Hospital
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Inset of an 1865 map showing Chimborazo Hospital. To the south (bottom) are the tracks of the Richmond and York Railroad
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| Location | Richmond, Virginia |
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| Coordinates | 37°25′45″N 77°22′25″W / 37.42917°N 77.37361°WCoordinates: 37°25′45″N 77°22′25″W / 37.42917°N 77.37361°W |
| Built | 1862 |
Chimborazo Hospital was an American Civil War era facility built in Richmond, Virginia to service the medical needs of the Confederate Army. It functioned between 1862 and 1865 in what is now Chimborazo Park, treating over 76,000 injured Confederate soldiers. During its existence, the hospital admitted nearly 78,000 patients and between 6,500 and 8,000 of these patients died. This mortality rate of between 8.3 and 10.3 percent is among the lowest such rates of period military hospitals.
In the early days of the Civil War, most people did not expect the conflict to last more than a few months, so the Confederate government failed to immediately established many kinds of necessary military infrastructure, including military infrastructure. Many soldiers were sent to civilian houses to receive medical care, resulting in both unsatisfactory care and illness of many caretakers. Most Richmond-area military hospitals were not purpose-built buildings, but rather repurposed existing structures, including warehouses, hotels, homes, and stores. These facilities quickly became overcrowded and Samuel P. Moore, the new surgeon general of the Confederacy, needed to quickly identify new potential hospital sites.
Simultaneously and coincidentally, an undeveloped plateau on the east end of Richmond called Chimborazo Hill, slaves began building a permanent winter quarters including soldiers’ barracks, officers’ quarters, three hospitals, and a bake house. Since most Confederate soldiers would be wintering further north, Moore decided to convert the barracks into a hospital, appointing Dr. James B. McCaw, a professor at the Medical College of Virginia, as surgeon-in-chief.
Recording keeping at Chimborazo Hospital was meticulous. There were ninety hospital wards, which all had shingled roofs, wood-plank floors, and whitewashed walls (interior and exterior). Each side of each building had three doors and ten windows; each window had a white curtain. Each ward was warmed by a wood stove and lit at night by a single candle. Each ward measured eighty by twenty feet and contained approximately forty beds. In addition to hospital wards, there were also bake houses, kitchens, ice houses, a soap house, a stable, a guard house, a chapel, a bathhouse, carpenter, blacksmith and apothecary shops, and five dead houses. Each building was surrounded by wide avenues, as McCaw believed fresh air was a medical necessity for recovery.
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