Other Causes of Severe Wounds from Bullets

Not all the explosive wounds were caused by gunpowder-filled musket shells. Little understood at the time, though recent research has shed some light on the subject, was the existence of a temporary wound cavity of enormous proportions during the passage of the bullet. This temporary cavity was caused by a transfer of energy from the bullet point tangent to the body, to the fluids of the body. Since water is incompressible, the result is to accelerate the water, hence the flesh, rapidly away from the projectile due to the lighter inertia of the body tissue. This energy imparted to the tissue caused development of a cavity which expanded to many times the size of the bullet, flexing several times as the elasticity of the muscle fibers tried to restrict the cavity against the force of the energy-transferred fluids. The effect was to cause a secondary rending and tearing of the flesh.
The passing of the bullet excavated, by physically destroying flesh equal to the diameter of the bullet. The temporary cavity ruptured blood vessels, extravasted blood, and “pulped” flesh throughout a far greater volume. This pulping or secondary damage from the temporary cavity was proportional to the velocity of the bullet.

Though the truly high velocities of today’s light sporting rifle bullets, pencil-like jacketed pellets of 150-200 grains weight average travelling at 3,000 feet per second, were not approached, the real velocity of the Minie bullet or the long, slender Whitworth sniper slug of .45 caliber were from 20 per cent to 100 per cent higher at termination than the round ball musket projectiles. The wounding effect, though not as extreme as the pulping from a high velocity modem expanding bullet that “spoils too much meat,” as the hunter says, was still terrible by contrast with common experience.
Accusation of being explosive bullets lay with such experience, resulting from improved ballistics of the new weapons. Medical science of the day had no understanding of the phenomenon. Only at the time of the Korean War, by using high speed X-Ray movies of dogs shot with steel bullets at high velocities, has this temporary cavity effect been reduced to understanding. At the time of the Civil War, experience with various kinds of gunshot wounds was slight—indeed, experience in military medicine, and medical personnel, were in short supply.

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CHAPTER 6 Rifle Muskets: Civil War Scandals

You place me in a most embarrassing position, Mr. Secretary. How is that, Mr. Wilkeson? the gaunt-faced Penn sylvanian queried, the lines of his expression amplified by the fatigue and, somewhat, disappointment with which he laid down his role as Secretary of War for Mr. Lincoln. Because, Mr. Cameron, the newspaperman re sponded, your contract for rifle muskets with the Eagle Manufacturing Company of Mansfield, Connecticut is for only 25,000 arms, and my friends there, whom I induced to engage in this business in expectation of your issuing a further order, as your assistant Mr. Scott assured me you would, will be sorely embarrassed in their operations on this small amount. Indeed this is bad news to me, Mr. Wilkeson, War Secretary Simon Cameron sympathetically observed, as he stuffed papers from his desk drawer into a large portfolio, scanning them briefly, consigning some to the waste basket. But as you can see, I am leaving office today; I believe Mister Stanton, who repla

The Gatling Gun

Ager, Williams, Vandenberg, these have faded into history. The repeating gun most remembered from the war, and yet one which had a very confusing record of use therein, is that of Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling. I had the pleasure of witnessing how effectively Dr. Gatling had builded when I attended a meeting of the American Ordnance Association at Aberdeen the fall of 1957 . Mounted on a testing stand was a small bundle of barrels, dwarfed in seeming firepower by the huge cannon flanking it. But when the gunner pushed the button and that mighty mite whirred into action with a high-pitched snarling roar so rapidly that no individual explosions could even be sensed, I knew I had witnessed not only the world’s fastest-firing machine gun, and the world’s heaviest gun in weight of metal fired (a ton and a half in one minute), but a gun that was directly inspired by the Civil War special artillery General Butler bought from Dr. Gatling. First of Gatling’s guns was bulky wheeled carriage “c

CHAPTER 7 Injustice to Justice

In justice to Justice, it must be said that a recent examination of one of the muskets, for the supplying of which to the Union he was so villified, proves to be a reasonably well-assembled hodgepodge of surplus parts and at least as strong and reliable as the American parts from which it was built. But when Philip S. Justice, gunmaker-importer of Philadelphia, tried to get aboard the Federal musket contract gravy train, he both got more than he bar gained for—and Holt and Owen conversely gave him less.

Civil War Guns

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