Morbid Fact Du Jour for November 17, 2015

Today’s Pulverizing Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In 1855 the secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, selected the Minié/rifle combo as the U.S. military’s official arms and ammo. Six years later, as president of the Confederacy, Davis no doubt rued his earlier enthusiasm. Manufacturers started churning out untold numbers of cheap Minié bullets – which soldiers called “minnie balls” – and factories in the north especially started stamping out millions of Minié-compatible rifles, which butchered boys almost from sea to shining sea. The guns weighed ten pounds, cost $15 ($210 in today’s money), and measured about five feet long. They also had an eighteen-inch bayonet, which was risible, since this gun more or less rendered the bayonet a foolish relic: rarely could soldiers get close enough to plunge one in anymore. (Mitchell once estimated that mule kicks hurt more soldiers during the Civil War than bayonets.) The Minié bullet also pushed cannons far back behind the infantry lines and greatly diminished the power of the mounted cavalry charge, since horses were even easier to pick off than humans. By some estimates Miniés killed 90 percent of the soldiers who died on the battlefield.

Unfortunately, many Civil War commanders – steeped in antiquated tactics and drenched in the romance of Napoleonic charges – never adjusted to the new reality. Most notoriously, on the day Mitchell arrived at Gettysburg, some 12,500 Confederate soldiers stormed a stone fence held by the Union. Pickett’s Charge. Among other troops, soldiers with piles of minnie balls were waiting, and they pulped the guts and pulverized the bones of the chargers up and down the line.

An injured soldier might languish for days before a stretcher team or ambulance wagon lugged him to a clinic. There, he might wait hours more until a surgeon in a bloody apron appeared, a knife between his teeth. The surgeon would probe the wound with fingers still crimson from the last patient, and if he decided to amputate, one assistant knocked the patient out with chloroform or ether, another put the limb into a headlock, and the third got ready to clamp the arteries. Four minutes later, the limb fell. The surgeon hollered “Next!” and walked on. This work might continue all day – one Kentucky surgeon remembered his fingernails getting soft from absorbing so much blood – and fresh graves ringed every hospital. Walt Whitman recalled the crude tombstones, mere barrel-staves or broken boards stuck in the dirt.

Culled from: The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery

Incidentally, the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. (well, Silver Spring, MD technically) has a lovely collection of minnie ball injuries. Here are a few photos I took when I was there earlier this year.