Confederate Hospitals on the Move: Samuel H. Stout and the Army of Tennessee (review)

332CIVIL WAR HISTORY Southern Women, edited by Jan Begos.) Berlin adopted a conservative approach toward editing the diary, leaving Bacot's "loquacious narrative" (xn) virtually intact. Editorial intervention is largely seen in the text's indispensable footnotes which identify persons, places, and events. This newest number in the distinguished series, Women s Diaries and Letters of the Nineteenth-Century South, edited by Carol Bleser, makes a distinct contribution to the literature of the Civil War and to women's history. It especially complements the series's A Woman Doctor 's Civil War: Esther Hill Hawks ' Diary ( 1 984). James O. Breeden Southern Methodist University Confederate Hospitals on the Move: Samuel H. Stout and the Army of Tennessee . By Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Pp. 226. $29.95.) For his times, Dr. Samuel H. Stout was a hospital administrative wizard. A practitioner in a small Tennessee town when the Civil War opened, he soon rose to become medical director of hospitals of the Confederate Army of Tennessee. By chance and by design Stout preserved some fifteen hundred pounds of medical records relating to his operation of the hospitals of the Army of Tennessee. A Tennessean, Stout received the M.D. in 1 848 from the University of Pennsylvania . For several years he served as a schoolteacher; he then farmed and practiced medicine in Giles County, Tennessee. When the Civil War erupted, Stout promptly joined the Provisional Confederate Army as a medical officer. In November 1861, he was asked to take charge of the Gordon Hospital in Nashville, where he remained until that city fell in February 1 862. Stout next commanded two small hospitals in Chattanooga. In this capacity, his administrative talents sufficiently impressed Gen. Braxton Bragg, commander of what was to become the Army of Tennessee, that Bragg placed Stout in charge of all of the Army of Tennessee hospitals in the Chattanooga area, a post with increasing responsibility as a result of army movements. In mid- 1 863, Stout was appointed medical director of hospitals for the Army of Tennessee, an enormously important position that he held until the end of the war. At one time, he managed more than sixty hospitals scattered from Montgomery, Alabama, to Augusta, Georgia. Schroeder-Lein makes repeated and good use of the fifteen hundred pounds of hospital records saved by Stout. She cites frequently "Some Facts of the History of the Organization of the Medical Service of the Confederate Armies and Hospitals," a twenty-three-part series by Stout published in Southern Practitioner (1900-1903), and "Outline of the Organization of the Medical Department of the Confederate Army and Department of Tennessee," prepared by Stout in 1 887 at the request of Tennessee governor James D. Porter and edited by Sam L. Clark and H. D. Riley, Jr. (1957). In his various positions, Stout assigned physicians, stewards, and matrons to hospitals; arbitrated their dis- BOOK REVIEWS333 agreements; and disciplined or transferred them as necessary. He selected hospital sites; designed structures; goaded medical purveyors, commissaries, and quartermasters who were often slow to supply hospitals; and assisted in obedience to orders from the Confederate government. We are told about the selection of hospital sites, the treatment and feeding of patients, the supplying and staffing of hospitals. A particularly interesting chapter is that on the mobility, relocation, and continued operation under Stout of hospitals as Confederate military lines were forced South. With the end of the war Stout's wealth and position vanished. His administrative talents were no longer sought. The major theme of the last thirty-five or more years of his life was his constant but sad search for financial security and for an opportunity to publish his Civil War papers. His longtime objective of publishing a three-volume work on the Army of Tennessee Medical Department was never realized. He resided in several different locations in Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee. The author has provided a detailed story of Stout's life and his career as medical director ofhospitals ofthe Army ofTennessee. The book is well researched and provides useful information on medical education and hospital operations of that time. Valuable are the appendices, one of which describes...