The Civil War Years

In April 1862 New Orleans surrendered to a Union fleet with minimal resistance. Federal troops occupied the city, and the Medical College was shuttered for the duration of the war, due to the fact many students and faculty members had joined the Confederate Army. Severe physician shortages resulted. In 1862, Charity’s assistant house surgeon resigned, and a twenty-one year old medical student named Ernest Lewis was given a special exam and granted that position. When the house surgeon also resigned, Lewis, at the age of twenty-one, was made the house surgeon of Charity Hospital.

After the Civil War, the medical school slowly came back, thanks in large part to the abundance of patients at Charity Hospital, now swelled with the ranks of freed blacks. Until the Civil War, valuable slaves were treated on the surrounding plantations, and Charity saw mainly poor immigrants and sailors.

In 1865 Dr. Stone returned to New Orleans and continued to give lectures. However the school’s very existence depended on tuition year to year, and as such entrance requirements were lax. Ernest Lewis, who at 21 had been made Charity’s house surgeon, reflected in 1922 that “ignorance and illiteracy” characterized most of the medical students and exams were “perfunctory and superficial, with but few rejections.” Until 1879, each year’s session only lasted four months, and only two sessions were required to graduate until 1893.

In 1884 matters improved greatly when Paul Tulane bequeathed the massive sum of $1.25 million dollars to establish the Tulane University of Louisiana. The Medical Department of the University of Louisiana, until now state-supported, became part of the private Tulane University.

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