National Museum of Civil War Medicine

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine first opened its doors to the public in 1996 and is located in the historic Carty Building at 48 East Patrick Street in downtown Frederick, Maryland. The building itself dates to the 1830s and predates the Civil War. Before the war, it was owned by James Whitehill, a furniture maker and undertaker who later supplied caskets and wooden grave markers to the military hospitals operating in Frederick.

In 1862, after the battles of South Mountain and Antietam flooded Frederick with wounded and dead, embalmer Dr. Richard Burr worked from this location. Burr was an early commercial embalmer who pre-sold his services to soldiers — a practice that contributed to later regulation of the embalming profession. The museum's exhibits include a life-size diorama of Burr at work, and it explicitly identifies the building as his Civil War-era embalming station.

Frederick itself was a major hospital town after Antietam, with multiple public buildings and private homes pressed into service as Union General Hospitals. The Carty Building's role in handling the dead — both through Whitehill's caskets and Burr's embalming operation — makes it one of the most direct surviving connections to the medical and mortuary infrastructure that grew up around the 1862 Maryland Campaign.

Today the museum interprets Civil War medical practice across multiple galleries, including a Camp Life gallery, surgical theater recreations, and rotating exhibits on figures such as Clara Barton and Dr. Jonathan Letterman. It anchors the wider Frederick Civil War medicine trail that includes affiliated sites such as Pry House Field Hospital Museum at Antietam and the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office in Washington, DC.