Today’s Resected Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

During the American Civil War, the type of surgical treatment and the timing of surgery represented the chief decisions faced by trauma surgeons.  Records in the South from earlier in the war showed that nearly 65% of all wounds were extremity wounds; twelve separate Union records showed more than 71% of all wounds were of the extremities. Orthopaedic treatment was generally classified into three types: conservative (expectant), excision (resection), or amputation. The philosophy of choosing one of these treatments shifted during the war. As the war continued and surgeons became more experienced, they also became more conservative. There were proponents of resections who felt that life and limb were to be saved by such a surgery. Arguments against resection and for amputation included useless limbs, longer hospital stays, and an increased infection rate. Amputation was regarded as the most aggressive surgical approach. Many surgeons gained the reputation of Saw-bones if their colleagues felt they were quick to amputate a limb. In order to assist surgeons making the decision of whether to amputate or excise, guidelines were distributed in the form of handbooks or in medical journals. These guidelines included amputation if the limb was nearly amputated from the initial injury or if there was extensive soft tissue damage, neurovascular injury of major nerves or blood vessels, or open fractures of the joints or thigh. Recommendations for excision only without amputation included gunshot wounds of the fingers, toes, wrist, shoulder, elbow, and ankle if the major nerves and arteries escaped injury. Resection was only advised if the guidelines for amputation were not met. Also, amputation from gunshot wounds of the upper two-thirds of the thigh and hip joint had such high mortality, surgeons were told not to amputate at these levels. In these areas death from the amputation approached 100%. Amputation was also excluded in cases where the soldier was mortally wounded elsewhere, such as the chest, head or abdomen. The surgical approach also varied based on whether an upper or lower extremity was injured. Surgeons tended toward conservative approaches when treating injuries of the distal upper extremity (hand and wrist) and the proximal lower extremity (thigh region).

Civil War Amputation in progress.  See you, wouldn’t wanna be you!

Culled from: Orthopaedic Injuries of the Civil War: An Atlas of Orthopaedic Injuries and Treatments During the Civil War

Ghastly! – Amputation Edition

June 21, 1865 by Reed Brockaway Bontecou. In this remarkable carte de visite, Private Parmenter lies unconscious from anesthesia on an operating table at Harewood Hospital in Washington, D.C. To save his patient’s life, Doctor Bontecou amputated the soldier’s wounded, ulcerous foot. Before the discovery of antibiotics, gangrene was a dreaded and deadly infection that greatly contributed to the high mortality rate of soldiers during the Civil War.

Culled from Pinterest.

Ghastly! – Angular Vein Edition

Here’s another excerpt from Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia by Gretchen Worden.

The Angular Vein (1993) – Shelby Lee Adams

Face demonstrating the angular vein, prepared by Oscar V. Batson, M.D. (1894-1979), Professor Emeritus of Anatomy, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, according to the method of Professor Werner Spalteholz of Leipzig (1861-1940). The tissue is rendered translucent and immersed in a mixture of methyl salicylate and benzyl benzoate, allowing visualization of the vein, which has been injected with a contrast medium.

Today’s Capsized Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

For today’s fact, I’m going to revisit the July 24, 2011 Morbid Fact:

For an hour, while passengers were boarding the steamship Eastland on this rainy but otherwise calm Saturday (July 24, 1915), the ship slowly rocked back and forth from starboard to port. The motion of the boat, which was scheduled to take employees of the Western Electric Co. on an excursion to Michigan City, Ind., did not alarm the crew.

At 7:25 a.m., the list to port became more severe. A refrigerator behind the bar toppled over with a crash, and the 2,573 passengers and crew suddenly realized that disaster was upon them. As it was being cast loose from its moorings on the south bank of the Chicago River between LaSalle and Clark Streets, the Eastland slowly settled on its side. The ship was only a few feet from the wharf, where a large crowd of horrified spectators watched, and it was in only 20 feet of water. That, however, was deep enough to drown 844 people who were trapped or trampled below decks. Although most were young factory workers from Berwyn and Cicero, 21 entire families were wiped out.

“The screaming was terrible,” one man told the Tribune, which devoted 11 pages of coverage to the disaster. “I watched one woman who seemed to be thrown from the top deck. . . . I saw her white hat float down the river, and that was all.”

Of the many Great Lakes shipping accidents, the Eastland disaster was by far the worst; the sinking of the Lady Elgin in 1860, in which 279 people perished, is a distant second.

Court decisions blamed improperly weighted ballast tanks for the disaster. But transportation historian George W. Hilton argued in a 1995 book that the international reaction to the sinking of the Titanic three years earlier ultimately doomed the Eastland, which had almost capsized in 1904 with 2,370 people aboard.

Because there were lifeboats and rafts for less than half the Titanic’s licensed passenger capacity, an international furor arose. Sen. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin introduced a bill that required ships to have enough lifeboats for 75 percent of their passengers.

On July 2, 1915, the owners of the Eastland added three lifeboats and six rafts, weighing 14 to 15 tons, to its top deck. A boat that had already exhibited stability problems became top-heavy. Three weeks later, the next time it was loaded to capacity, the Eastland capsized.

Culled from: Chicago Tribune

Here’s a photograph I took of the site of the disaster a couple years ago. More information on the disaster can be found in the description of the image on the linked Flickr page:

Eastland Footage!

And I revisited the Eastland disaster because news came in today that the first known motion picture footage of the Eastland disaster has been discovered!

First Known Archived Footage of the Eastland Disaster

Ghastly!

The latest book in the Library Eclectica is Murder Has a Public Face by Larry Millett.  It is a collection of crime and punishment photos in the Speed Graphic era taken in the St. Paul, Minnesota area.  I thought I’d share some of the images with you.  Here’s the first excerpt:

Photographers of the Speed Graphic era seldom tried to soften the visceral impact of violent death. The woman here, her hair tangled in a thick pool of blood, is 50-year old Mable Person of Shafer, Minnesota . She and her husband, Emory, along with their 23-year old daughter, Lois were bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer at their family farm home in March 1957. The couple’s son Douglas, 22, was later arrested and charged with the murders. Reporter-photographer Don Spavin’s picture, which also shows a blood-smeared door behind Mrs. Person, is among the most gruesome  images in the Pioneer Press and Dispatch archives.  Dispatch, Don Spavin, March 1, 1957.