Effect of Minie Ball

But to the large, easily-probed holes gouged out of living flesh by round slow-moving blobs of lead of 3/4-inch diameter, a new dimension had been added— the Minie ball.
At nominal ranges, velocities were higher and were better sustained than with the round bullets. Terminal velocity—which is the dispassionate name that the ballistician gives to the “thwack” that to the living is the sound of death—terminal velocities were higher. Methods of preserving cadavers from the battlefield for study did not exist; nor would it have been a socially acceptable practice to explore the bloated mounds of flesh for causes of death. Better to bury them, sometimes without identification in mass graves, and turn your talents toward succoring the living, Doctor.

It was on the living, those who survived the trauma that the Richmond Laboratories or the bullet-stamping machine at Crittenden and Tibbals or Frankford Arsenal sought to inflict; on the living that the research was carried out to determine why they were the lucky ones, and their partners, the dead.
So it is that the literature of the era speaks of “Gunshot wounds” as if no one had died; the carefully detailed illustrations in the Medical & Surgical History of the War are of living targets, men who, broken in body, still lived. Perhaps because less extensive exploration was done than pure science might have wanted, the literature of the period is incomplete. The effect of a small missile suddenly introduced into the living system was described in extrinsic detail, but the phenomena of the wounding process itself remained much of a mystery until many wars later.
For the nature of the Minie ball wound was often so terrible, so blasting to tissue, that the cry arose “The (Rebels, Yankees; cross out one) are using explosive bullets.” A shot in the extremities would, on being cleansed, reveal fragments of shattered bone several inches distant from the source of the injury. What should have been a penetrating wound (some as neatly as if a lancet were thrust between radius and ulna) became a terrible, crippling, smashing invasion of the sacred machine, splitting bones like green twigs and extravasating blood in a vast volume of tissue about the path of the projectile. War, in the Wilder-

The sacred machine stopped. Ballistic shock, hemorrhage, brought life’s end to unknown Confederate soldier of Ewell’s Corps during attack of May 19, 1864. Bad luck, not bad armament, caused death, for his fine Enfield long rifle, good as the North’s best, lay near when Brady took this photo.

ness, at Pittsburgh Landing, at Manassas, was indeed hell.