Touro Infirmary

The first admission book, which covers 1855 to 1860, shows who actually filled the beds. Entry one is Peter Peterson, an 18-year-old Danish seaman admitted with dysentery who stayed 21 days; of the 40 people on the first page only one was born in New Orleans. Historian Erin Greenwald puts about 45 percent of pre-Civil War patients as enslaved people, some brought in by slave traders, who paid about a dollar a day for them against five for others. The book records illnesses and deaths, and Touro issued health certificates to those who recovered.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.9 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 1.1 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 1.1 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 1.3 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.

More markers nearby

• Confederate Memorial Hall — 0.4 mi
• Margaret's Place and Walk / Lower Garden District — 0.5 mi
• Bank's Arcade — 0.6 mi
• Higgins Boat (LCVP) — 0.8 mi