1864 — Feb-April 1865, Scurvy, Union POW’s, Camp Sumter, Andersonville, GA –3,614
–~13,000 14 months, “from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure.”[1]
–~13,000 Feb 1864-April 1865.[2] Scurvy, diarrhea and dysentery. Wikipedia.
— 3,614 USA Surgeon General. Medical and Surgical History of the War or the Rebellion.[3]
— ~3,250 Mayberry. “Scurvy and Vitamin C.” Harvard Law School paper, Winter 2004.[4]
— 3,000 Sauberlich in Packer and Fuchs. Vitamin C in Health and Disease. 1997, p. 13.[5]
Narrative Information
National Park Service: “Nearly 13,000 prisoners died at Andersonville of disease and malnutrition.”
Includes a letter from Joseph Jones, Surgeon, Provisional Army, Confederate States to Confederate Army Surgeon General S. P. Moore, dated 10-19-1864 (from Macon, GA)
Which notes:
….I {visited} Camp Sumter, Andersonville, GA…There were more than 5,000 seriously sick in the hospital and stockade, and the deaths ranged from 90 to 130 each day. Since the establishment of this prison on 24th of February 1864, to the present time over 10,000 Federal prisoners have died; that is, near one-third of the entire number have perished in less than seven months….
Diarrhea, dysentery, scurvy, and hospital gangrene were the diseases which have been
the main cause of this extraordinary mortality….
More than 30,000 men crowded upon twenty-seven acres of land, with little or no shelter from the intense heat of a Southern summer, or from the rain and from the dew of night…
(NPS. Andersonville. “Medical Conditions at Andersonville Prison Webquest.”)
Sources
Mayberry, Jason Allen. “Scurvy and Vitamin C.” Harvard Law School paper, Winter 2004. Accessed 5-24-2018 at: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8852139/Mayberry.html
National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Andersonville. “History of the Andersonville Prison.” 4-14-2015 update. Accessed 5-23-2018 at: https://www.nps.gov/ande/learn/historyculture/camp_sumter_history.htm
National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Andersonville. “Medical Conditions at Andersonville Prison Webquest.” Accessed 5-24-2018 at: https://www.nps.gov/ande/learn/education/upload/medicalconditions-webquest.pdf
Sauberlich, Howerde E. “A History of Scurvy and Vitamin C.” pp. 1-24 in: Packer, Lester and Jürgen Fuchs (eds.). Vitamin C in Health and Disease. New York, Basel, Hong Kong: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1997. Google preview accessed 5-23-2018 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=4nODCOzu2n8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
United States Army Surgeon General. The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (Part III, Vol. I, Medical History). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1888. Accessed 5-24-2018 at: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-14121350R-mvset
Wikipedia. Andersonville National Historic Site. 5-7-2018 update. Accessed 5-23-2018 at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andersonville_National_Historic_Site
[1] National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Andersonville. “History of the Andersonville Prison.” As the “Medical Conditions…” page makes clear, however, this number of deaths applied to all diseases as well as malnutrition, thus we do not use 13,000 as our estimate of the scurvy subset.
[2] Dates are from Wikipedia and are the dates the camp was open.
[3] Table XV. Summarizing the Records of the Hospital at Camp Sumter, Andersonville, Georgia. Notes this was out of 5,662 cases, with the results of 377 unrecorded, amounting to 68.4% death rate, and a ration of deaths per 1,000 deaths at 326.0, second only to diarrhoea and dysentery, which had a ration of 505.6.
[4] Our number, based on: “…the Confederate prison of Andersonville had scurvy death rates as high as 25%.” Cites: Alfred Bollet, “Malnutrition in Civil War Armies,” The Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, 19 (Autumn 2003). Using National Park Service number of 13,000 disease and malnutrition deaths, we multiply by 25% to derive 3,250.
[5] “Approximately 3000 Union soldiers imprisoned at Andersonville, Georgia, died from scurvy.”