Head Injuries

Dr. Paul Steiner, writing in Military Medicine, May, 1956, gives some interesting notes on head injuries, evidently at relatively low velocities. “Was it worth while having men with head wounds carried from the field?” was a topic of interest to surgeons in the spring of 1864. Brigadier General Alexander S. Webb and Brigadier General James S. Wadsworth discussed the matter; both were to fall victim of head wounds, Wadsworth to die, Webb to remember and to write about it.

Matthew Brady’s ubiquitous bright rifle musket adds incongruous note to grim lesson of War: the silent brutality of death which the living too soon forget. Bounding lazily like a ball, spent 12-pounder shell has disembowled Federal soldier.

Webb noted to Wadsworth that in his experience a case was past cure if, with a head wound, when he slowly lost his vertical position he was incapable of making a movement of his head from the ground. Webb, wounded at Gettysburg at the head of his brigade while repelling Pickett’s Charge, was a second time hit at the “Bloody Angle” in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, May 12, 1864.
“The bullet passed through the corner of my eye and came out behind my ear,” he recalled. “While falling from the horse to the ground I recalled my conversation with General Wadsworth; when I struck the ground I made an effort to raise my head, and when I found I could do so, I made up my mind I was not going to die of that wound, and then I fainted.” General Webb recovered slowly, and though not again assigned to command it was not from any lack of mental ability. As chief-of-staff to Meade, then commanding the Army of the Potomac, Webb finished the War as a brevet major general, U. S. Army, and was honorably discharged at his own request in 1870.
His colleague General Wadsworth fared less easily. On May 6, 1864, the second day of the battle of the Wilderness, General Wadsworth led his men in a charge up the Plank Road and fell from a bullet in the head. His last day was recorded by a young physician, Z. Boylston Adams, of Massachusetts, a captain of G Company, 56th Massachusetts V. I., who had been injured in the leg and captured at the time General Wadsworth’s body was recovered by the Confederates. In attendance on the wounded were Doctors Miner and Gaston, of Mahone’s brigade, A. P. Hill’s corps. Says Adams of the doctors, “both smelled pretty strongly of whisky,” which was as much a tonic for a doctor elbows deep in blood after the carnage of a typical Civil War battle, as it was a soporific for the injured to help knock out the pain as the saws bit deeper. When Adams regained consciousness after a leg amputation he saw he was lying beside a Union general with a tag in his hand reading “General James S. Wadsworth.”
“I lifted his eyelids, but there was ‘no speculation in those eyes,’ ” Adams relates. “I felt his pulse, which was going regularly. His breathing was a little labored. There was no expression of pain, but occasionally a deep sigh. His noble features were calm and natural, except that his mouth was drawn down at the left side. His right arm was evidently paralyzed, which indicated that the injury was to the left brain. Examining further, I found that a musket ball had entered the top of his head a little to the left of the median line . . .
“The surgeons came Saurday night and examined General Wadsworth’s wound, removing a piece of the skull, and then probing for the ball; (the latter struck me as bad surgery). One remarkable thing about the case was that the ball had entered near the top of the head, had gone forward, and was lodged in the anterior lobe of the left side of the brain. One can only conjecture how such a wound was received, but I have since learned that his horse was shot and fell with him, and it may have been that he was hit as he fell forward, or bent forward his head in anticipation of a volley from the advancing enemy. He seemed to be unable to swallow, for if more than a teaspoonful was put into his lips, it ran out of the corners of his mouth upon his beard. Occasionally he heaved a deep sigh, but otherwise lay in calm slumber. On Sunday the 8th, he became comatose, with rising and falling respiration and ceased to breathe finally at near two p.m. having lived about forty-eight hours since his wounding.”