Bone Damage

Howard noticed that round balls made a seemingly more severe wound, greater comminution of bone. The word describes bone made small or fine as by grinding. What was overlooked by Howard but not ignored in the official histories of Civil War medicine was the shattering effect sometimes found in Minie wounds which caused a wound much more severe than the neat entrance-exit holes other times observed. For when the round ball hit, it sheared and chopped its way through the leg; when the Minie hit with enough speed, the bone might be split and shattered into large fragments, each one of which proceeded off in a direction roughly spherical to the point of impact, causing severe secondary lacerations. Howard’s views are interesting; they were not authoritative for diagnosis.
If the word is not challenged as inappropriate, the subject of death had its wryly humorous aspect. One was in the oft-repeated “accident” of getting one’s foot knocked off by a cannon ball. Though slow moving, less than sonic velocity and of size to make them plainly visible as they neared, the popular 12-pounder round ball of about 4 V2 -inch dameter sent a good many voluntary injuries to the rear. So leisurely did a cannon ball bound along as it skipped through wagons, mules, and infantry ranks seemingly undeterred by the gory mass piled up behind it, that the soldier was not above sticking his foot out to “stop” it. “Comminuted” is a good description indeed for the hash that remained as the stump of the soldier’s leg. At good speed, the shock was not transmitted through the leg because the rate of motion of the projectile was faster than the propagation of stresses through the limb. The wound was a sheared wound. At slowest speeds, the leg might be torn off at the hip or smashed at the knee. The “joke” was on the man who sought to escape battle and be returned to the rear with a “minor” wound.