Freedmen's Bureau Operates 40+ Hospitals, Treats 500,000

The Freedmen's Bureau established or operated at least 40 hospitals and treated an estimated 450,000-500,000 patients during its existence. Formerly enslaved people suffered acute health crises from emancipation's disruption of plantation medical care (however coercive). Bureau physicians documented mass smallpox outbreaks and treated wounds from Klan attacks. Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C., established by the Bureau in 1865, eventually became Howard University Hospital.