Internal Repairs not Attempted

How many gallant North Carolinians Surgeon Howard killed with his bungling analysis of gunshot wounds is a toll of death no rolls record. But he should perhaps be forgiven his faulty diagnosis of high velocity wounds and their supposedly slight bone damage between those neat holes of entrance and exit, for little exploratory surgery was ever resorted to on the battlefield dressing table. Surgeon Howard preferred in his practice of the inexact science to draw exact inferences and make generalizations good for all cases. That such an approach to medicine is impossible was not revealed to him in his study of gunshot wounds, because he overlooked one branch of preservative surgery to which more modern medicos have, often broken heartedly, devoted their career. This is repairs of gunshots within the body cavity itself.

The doctor brave enough to rip open an abdominal wall and go in and stitch the little holes in a perforated intestine might have existed, but the new work of Pasteur was but a medical journal report, not reduced to practice, and Lister's antiseptics had not yet gained any general acceptance though gallons of rot-gut were poured into festering wounds in a dim-sighted understanding that this was “cleaning” them. Death for sure sat on the shoulder of any doctor who did such drastic surgery under the battlefield conditions of sanitation; death probably claimed its victim in the presence of all the clean towels and “hot water” the students could prepare at the most advanced medical college. Howard’s experience in dealing actively with gunshot wounds, as was the experience of most other physicians, related strictly to the arms and legs; in working with these, was the most success to be found. For success, read: the patient lived, even though a multiple amputee. Howard's appraisal of internal damage from higher-velocity bullets was quite incorrect and must have led to a great deal of suffering. Repairs effected without proper surgery were but a tribute to the tenacity with which the physiognomy of the injured soldier repaired itself.

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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 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...

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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