Sally Tompkins financed and directed Robertson Hospital in Richmond during the American Civil War. A commission in the Confederate Army allowed her to keep the hospital operating under military administration.
Robertson Hospital
Tompkins was born on November 9, 1833 at Poplar Grove in Mathews County, Virginia, into a wealthy family, and was living in Richmond on her own means when the war began.
After the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 the wounded overwhelmed Richmond. Tompkins asked Judge John Robertson for the use of his house on Third Street and opened it as a hospital, paying for it herself.
The commission
In the autumn of 1861 the Confederate government ordered all private hospitals closed and their patients moved into military hospitals under army surgeons. Robertson Hospital was about to be shut.
President Jefferson Davis's solution was to commission Tompkins as a captain of cavalry in the Confederate States Army, on September 9, 1861, so that her hospital was legally a military one under a commissioned officer, and could stay open with her running it.
She is very probably the only woman commissioned in the Confederate Army. She accepted the commission and refused the pay:
I would not allow my name to be placed upon the payroll of the army.
The numbers
A U.S. Army medical history records 73 deaths among 1,333 admissions to Robertson Hospital from August 1861 through April 1865.
That is about 5.5 deaths per 100 admissions. Comparing that figure with another hospital’s results would require information about which patients each admitted and how long they were followed. The count alone cannot establish how nurse staffing affected patient outcomes.
Afterwards
Tompkins spent most of her fortune on the hospital and lived modestly afterwards on charitable work. She never married, and turned down several proposals. In 1896 she hosted a reunion for her former patients.
In 1905 she moved into the Confederate Woman's Home in Richmond, which took her without charge, and she died there on July 25, 1916 at 82. She was buried with full military honours at Christ Church in Mathews County.
Related
- Mary Ann Bickerdyke
- Clara Barton
- Susie King Taylor
- Nurse staffing and patient outcomes
- Nursing in Virginia
Sources
- Sally Louisa Tompkins, for the chronology, the commission and the hospital's figures. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Sally Louisa Tompkins. Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Robertson Hospital. National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- U.S. Army Medical Department: History of the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps, Chapter 1, note 82 (accessed 2026-11-11)