Dr. Frederick Winsor

Who is Dr. Frederick Winsor?

Dr. Frederick Winsor was a Civil War surgeon, head of the Massachusetts State Hospital and longtime physician in Salem, Massachusetts.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 2, 1829, Winsor was the youngest of 12 children of Thomas Winsor and Welthea Sprague, one of 15 children of Seth Sprague of Duxbury, Massachusetts, a famous Methodist anti-slavery leader.

Winsor attended Boston Latin School, and graduated Harvard University in 1851. He was known as a great athlete at Harvard, despite serious eye problems that forced him to leave school in his senior year and have his lessons read to him in order to graduate. He then attended Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1855. That same year he began his long practice as a physician in Salem, Massachusetts. Winsor married Ann Bent Ware, daughter of Unitarian minister, professor, and abolitionist Henry Ware, Jr. and Mary Lovell Pickard, on August 10, 1857 in Milton, Massachusetts.

In 1861, Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew appointed Winsor head of the State Hospital at Rainsford Island. A year later he left his post to enlist as a surgeon in the 49th Massachusetts regiment, serving from 1862 to 1863 through the disastrous Louisiana Campaign under the command of Colonel William Francis Bartlett. During a disastrous frontal assault on Port Hudson, Mississippi on May 27, 1863, Bartlett was shot twice—once in his remaining unamputated leg and once in his wrist, shattering it. Dr. Winsor worked through the night to remove the bullet from Col. Bartlett's wrist, saving his hand. He would write a gripping account of that night years later for Atlantic Monthly: