Captain Sally Tompkins: Robertson Hospital and 73 Deaths in 1,334

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Sally Louisa Tompkins was born on November 9, 1833, at Poplar Grove, a Virginia tidewater estate. Her father died before she turned five, and in 1842 an epidemic killed three of her sisters, Martha, Harriet and Elizabeth, within weeks. She began nursing the sick in her community, and in 1854 moved with her family to Richmond. When trains brought hundreds of wounded men into the city after the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, the 28-year-old took over Judge John Robertson's house and turned it into a hospital staffed by women from St. James Episcopal Church and enslaved workers.

When Jefferson Davis ordered all military hospitals placed under military command, Robertson Hospital faced closure. On September 9, 1861, Davis commissioned Tompkins a captain in the Confederate States Army, making her the first woman formally inducted into an American army. She wrote on the commission that she refused to be placed on the payroll. Her strict cleaning, frequent bandage changes and ventilation produced the lowest mortality rate of any military hospital, Union or Confederate. After Richmond fell in April 1865, she persuaded the Union medical director to let her keep the hospital open two more months.

• Robertson Hospital treated 1,334 wounded soldiers over four years, and only 73 died.
• As Union blockades choked Richmond, the hospital hired a blockade runner to bring in medical supplies.
• Diarist Mary Chesnut called her our Florence Nightingale, and she declined several marriage proposals from soldiers she treated.
• She spent her inherited fortune on charity, moved into the Confederate Women's Home in 1905, and was buried with military honors in 1916.
• A 1960s statue designed by Salvador Dali drew public outrage and was never built, and the hospital site is now a 24-hour diner.