1864 Magnus Bird's Eye View of Harewood Hospital, Washington D.C.

Union hospital during the Civil War.

This is an 1864 bird's eye view of Harewood General Hospital by Charles Magnus. Harewood General Hospital was a pavilion-style hospital operated by the United States during the American Civil War to render care for Union personnel, which was in operation from September 4, 1862, to May 5, 1866. The view shows the V-shaped layout of the Hospital's barracks-like wards, as well as an array of orderly tents extending across fields and into the neighboring woods. (The site of the hospital can be found east of Georgia Avenue NW north of the Glenwood Cemetery and south of the Armed Forces Retirement Home. Washington Hospital Center, the Washington DC VA Medical Center and the Children's National Medical Center can be found there now.)

Innovations in Military Medicine

Harewood Hospital was part of the rapid expansion of Union military medicine developed to meet the unprecedented need for medical services resulting from the horrific casualties that characterized the American Civil War. The United States peacetime army had only 113 doctors on staff, nearly a quarter of which joined the secessionists. By the end of the war, the Union Army had more than twelve thousand doctors. Before the war, the only hospital in Washington, DC, was a two-story six-room building. The July 1861 was a small affair compared with the war's eventual bloodbaths, but even that outstripped the medical systems in place. The military had no ambulance corps, and the civilian ambulance drivers fled with the battle's first shots. Abandoned ambulances were commandeered by healthy soldiers fleeing back to Washington, DC. Wounded soldiers, on the other hand, lay on the battlefield for days. By the battle of Antietam - weeks after Harewood was established - the Union had developed a network of 71 field hospitals, channeling wounded to larger general hospitals, like Harewood. These were situated in large cities, and soldiers were transported there from the field hospitals by train or ship. At the end of the war, there were about 400 hospitals with about 400,000 beds. Harewood alone had nine wards of 63 beds each totaling 945 beds, with as many as 312 additional tents added to expand capacity to 1,872 beds.

The situation of Harewood in the capital made it easily accessible to visiting notables, among whom were President Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Walt Whitman.

Publication History and Census

During the War, Charles Magnus printed views of many of the Union hospitals and camps both in the form of letterhead writing paper and envelopes and also as separately issued prints such as this. These were very often the only visual records families would have of the places where their loved ones in the military were stationed, but while they were popular they survive poorly, seldom enjoying archival treatment. Consequently, this view is rare. We see only four examples catalogued in OCLC, at the American Antiquarian Society Library, the Boston Athenaeum, The University of California at Davis, and the Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

Cartographer

Charles Magnus (March 16, 1826 - May 3, 1900) was a German-American map and print publisher, stationer, and bookseller active in New York City from about 1850 until his death. Born Julian Carl Magnus in Elberfeld, Germany, he reportedly worked as a salesman for a silk firm before emigrating to the United States in 1848. In the early 1850s he learned the printing business while working with his older brother at the German-language weekly Deutsche Schnellpost. He married Christina Koerner, a native of Munich, in New York City on December 31, 1854. Magnus established a publishing business whose geographical productions included separate maps, pictorial lettersheets, city views, and the Commercial Atlas of the World, apparently issued in cooperation with the British firm George Philip and Son. His maps frequently combined geographical information with city panoramas, architectural vignettes, and decorative imagery also employed on his stationery. Rather than consistently commissioning original designs, he adapted and recombined existing illustrations, updating urban views as buildings and bridges appeared and later drawing extensively upon photographs. During the American Civil War he supported the Union through battlefield maps, military views, patriotic envelopes, and illustrated songsheets. Institutional accounts credit him with approximately 700 patriotic envelope designs and more than 300 illustrated songsheets from the war years, within a career output exceeding 1,000 different publications and designs. After the war his offerings expanded to include games, rewards of merit, advertising material, and custom printing, while his business increasingly emphasized retail sales. He maintained commercial connections with Germany and German-speaking Americans through bilingual captions, advertising, and imported publications. Magnus continued to employ lithography and hand coloring after competing printers had adopted photomechanical methods. His wife died in 1896, and he died at his daughter's home in New York City on May 3, 1900, leaving four surviving children.   Further Details...

Condition

Average. Several surface mends with minor loss to border, else a very attractive example.

References

OCLC 191117539. Reilly, R., MD 'Medical and surgical care during the American Civil War, 1861–1865' in Proceedings of the Baylor University Medical Center, 2016 Apr; 29(2): 138–142.