1862 – Drs. Thomas H. Pinkerton and J.C. Tucker received a contract for $2,000 per month to provide care – food, medicine, personnel, and housing – for county patients.ย Storey County Hospital consisted of two buildings: one to house up to 60 male patients and a second for 14 female patients. The insane were hospitalized in the basement.ย Principal disorders were scurvy, rheumatism, dysentery, malarial fevers (intermittent, remittent and continued), and the growing menace of trauma in mine shafts.ย One dead from mines per week.
1863 A new clinic with Dr. William S. Minneer, located in the “Canyon,” was opened.
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This is related by George D. Lyman to have occurred in the early 1860s in Virginia City when hundreds became sick and many died from drinking water contaminated with “arsenic, plumbago, and copperas.” Subsequent research has made this an unlikely event and the story apparently was an attempt by Lyman to glamorize the memory of Julia Bulette, a well-known Virginia City prostitute who was murdered. Lyman wrote that she turned her house into a hospital where she, Father Patrick Manogue, Reverend Franklin Rising, Dr. Edmund G Bryant, and Dr. Sheldon McMeans administered care to those poisoned. Ken Fung operated a Chinese hospital.