17 Mar 2014

Lost Capitol Hill: How Lincoln Hospital Got Its Name pt. 2

tnLast week, we looked at the origins of the name given to the Civil War hospital a mile east of the Capitol, and found that, contrary to legend, it was not named by the soldiers recuperating there. Today, we will try to find the origin of the legend – as well as another, similar, story.

So where did the story come from that Lincoln hospital had been named only after it opened, and by the soldiers who were recuperating there? The question goes back to the question of why it was named Lincoln in the first place. And as always, ‘why’ questions are the most difficult to answer – barring a letter, or other, similar, evidence, from the person responsible, there is usually no way to say for certain.

What can be said is how names had generally been assigned. In most cases, the name is either the name of the building in which the hospital is housed, or the area of the city in which it was built. For example, the name Cliffbourne came from the name of the house it was in, which in turn had been given that moniker due to its location on a cliff overlooking Rock Creek. Similarly, the Union Hospital took its name from the fact that it was housed in the old Union Hotel. In the case of the new, large, hospital being built in what was then open ground east of the Capitol, there was no landmark whose name could be used and there were not enough development in the area to give the neighborhood a name. Without any obvious choices, another name had to be found, and thus, presumably, the name of the President was chosen. This version is, of course, entirely unsatisfactory, and makes for poor storytelling. It is thus unsurprising that a legend grew up to account for the name, given the understandable human wish for neat stories.

This is not the only place that legend has as being named by its users. The other is up in the hills across the Anacostia River: St. Elizabeths. The story claims that “[d]uring the Civil War, the wounded soldiers were reluctant to write home that they were being treated at the ‘Government Hospital for the Insane.’ They began referring to the asylum as the St. Elizabeths Hospital after the colonial name of the tract of land where the hospital was located.”

St. Elizabeth's during the Civil War, from Harper's Magazine (St. Elizabeth's Patient Experience)

St. Elizabeth’s during the Civil War, from Harper’s Magazine (St. Elizabeth’s Patient Experience)

In fact, the portion of the Government Hospital for the Insane used for injured soldiers during the Civil War was always referred to as St. Elizabeths. The name came, as correctly stated in the quote above, from the name of the tract of land that had been given in 1662 to John Charman IV, St. Elizabeth. Why the ‘s’ was added eventually without the appropriate apostrophe can only be attributed to previous generations generally lackadaisical attitude toward such grammatical fine points.

The name St. Elizabeths had been used by Dorothea Dix, the mental health reformer, informally much earlier to refer to the hospital she had helped found. When the request for space in the unused (and unfinished) wards of the hospital came, the need for a new name was obvious, as was the name to be used. The hospital opened its door to its first patients on November 2, 1861; Less than two weeks later, the Washington Evening Star wrote that there had been 34 soldiers at “St. Elizabeth Hospital, Eastern Branch” on November 8. In short, it is clear that, from the first, the portion of the hospital used by convalescent soldiers was referred to as St Elizabeth, and that this did not stem from anything the patients said or wrote.


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