NOT ENOUGH BEDS

Not enough beds, enough sponges and clean rags, enough pillowcases. Not enough hospitals. Fifty thousand patients, in a city with a population only half again larger than that. Not enough shovels, neither time nor room to bury the dead. Not enough chaplains, orderlies, nurses, surgeons. No autoclave to sterilize the surgeons’ instruments until 1876, no proven germ theory of disease until 1881, no rubber gloves till 1889. This is 1863, the dome of the Capitol still incomplete. It’s strange how a city under construction can look very much like a city in ruins. In the commandeered larger spaces of new buildings, rows of cots occupied by young men who wore either color of uniform. Bandage and wound, scar and stub are their uniform now. A few will occupy these beds or others like them for months or years, and others for not long at all.

157 years later, in