College Hill Hospital

College Hill Hospital. Pioneering Mobile Care. After the Union occupation of Nashville in February 1862, Chattanooga's strategic location as a railroad junction made it a logical place for Confederate military supply and support services. Wounded and sick soldiers soon arrived, and city residents treated them. Confederate surgeons used large buildings as hospitals. One was the old Masonic Lodge (also called the Chattanooga Female Institute) located here on a spur of Cameron Hill first known as Academy Hill and later as College Hill. The hospital had only 64 beds. As casualties mounted. Confederate surgeon Samuel H. Stout added tents and constructed pavilion-style-wards, each holding 500 patients and providing proper ventilation. These facilities increased the number of available hospital beds to roughly 3,500, When the Confederates evacuated Chattanooga in September 1863, the hospital had treated more than 14,000 patients., Because Stout had witnessed the chaotic evacuation of Nashville, he organized the Chattanooga hospitals so that if the city was evacuated, they would retain the same organization, equipment, and personnel as they were moved to a new location. Some of Stout's hospitals moved in an orderly and intact manner to more than a dozen locations before the war ended in 1865. Medical historians consider Stout's innovation as a forerunner of the U.S. Army's Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) units of the mid-twentieth century., The Federal Army used Stout's former hospital facilities to treat the Union wounded after they occupied Chattanooga in the fall of 1863 until the end of the war in the spring of 1865., (sidebar) , Women served in hospitals behind the front lines, including those in the Chattanooga hospital complex. Among those who served in this role was Alabamian Kate Cumming, whose Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee (1866) provides one of the war's most vivid depictions of women's roles treating the wounded.