These statistics would allow for ready comparison between the North’s Civil War medical experience and the war experiences of other Western countries. One of the changes they made was instituting a new statistical classification system based on the model devised by the British epidemiologist, William Farr. Woodward, Brinton, and members of a special medical board reviewed reporting procedures in light of the army’s immediate needs and the requirements of compiling a resource for future use. Brinton to organize the vast amount of incoming medical and surgical information. He decided that strengthening existing medical record-keeping mechanisms and supplementing them with special surveys and studies would make the project more successful, and so appointed surgeons, Joseph J. The following month Hammond widened his scope to include statistics, descriptions, photographs, and drawings that formed the basis of the six volumes of Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. These items would eventually form the collection of the Army Medical Museum, which exists today as the National Museum of Health and Medicine.
Physicians were required to write and submit a case history to accompany the specimens. Hammond ascribed to the mid-nineteenth century sanitary philosophy that “the careful recording of vital medical events was as crucial to the management of medical affairs and institutions as bookkeeping was to the nation’s commercial establishments.” In May 1862, he ordered the army’s medical officers to gather and send to Washington unusual anatomical specimens as well as projectiles and foreign objects removed during operations. Like his subordinate Jonathan Letterman, Surgeon General William A. Though Letterman pitched the importance of medical record-keeping to army doctors as a scientific enterprise, he also believed the information could avert much of the organizational catastrophes and physical carnage the North experienced at outset of the War. Later in the War, Letterman requested reports on matters such as levels of supplies in hospitals, affording the knowledge to prepare facilities for treating troops. Regimental surgeons were to submit weekly lists of men relieved of duty due to illness, which facilitated assessing the number of men able to fight. The monthly reports were designed for medical officers to communicate with the Office of the Surgeon General about issues they were facing as well as to note where deficiencies needed to be addressed. In January of 1863, Letterman issued a decree to the army medical directors to appoint medical inspectors to make monthly reports that included both a standard form as well as an accompanying written report. The assistant-surgeon would also be responsible for creating two tabular statements of the wounded exemplified by the chart entitled “Wounded in the Second Corps.” Letterman decreed that the assistant-surgeon of every regiment submit a complete account of each case brought to the hospital, providing the name, rank, company, regiment, location, character of the injury, treatment, and the outcome.
He insisted that captains in newly established ambulance corps make a full disclosure after every action. Jonathan Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac, instituted several successive reforms beginning in September of 1862. Though the US Army Medical Department had maintained medical records since the 1820s, it was ill-prepared to handle a conflict of such magnitude. Statistics became increasingly important for managing medical institutions, supporting the polemics of competing medical factions, measuring the need for public health endeavors, and providing authenticity to scientific research. Medical record-keeping in the nineteenth century grew out of a burgeoning enthusiasm for quantification that impacted all aspects of culture.