Surfing the web last night, I stumbled upon this passage regarding U.S. Civil War casualties:
“Most surgeries were amputations and took place at the field hospitals. Of all the operations performed during the Civil War, 95% were done with the patient under some form of anesthesia. Chloroform and ether were the most common anesthetics. The large number of amputations performed during the war was the result of the severe nature of the wounds caused by the Minié ball, the number of wounded needing immediate treatment, and the often-poor condition of the patients…”
I had the impression that untold thousands of the wounded–perhaps the majority–received primitive medical care at best, and that amputation without anesthesia was the norm.
I don’t want this to become IMHO, so does anyone have solid information/cites?
Try this link for a dozen or so links relating to Civil War medicine.
I was always under the impression it was a pretty miserable affair given to the horrible damage weapons of the time could inflict (those musket balls were nasty…inaccurate but nasty). Get shot in the arm today by most handheld weapons and you stand a good chance of keeping your arm. Get shot in the arm back then by a musket and keeping your arm was an iffy thing (although in fairness I don’t know how much better today’s medicine could do either…at some point too much damage is done to be repairable).
Anyway…I’m just throwing WAGs out here left and right. Hopefully the link above will get you the straightdope on what you’re looking for.
I thought that modern military ammunition was specifically designed to take off limbs and blow big gaping holes in the enemy, what with bullets that tumble and/or fragment on impact. How would these compare with minnie balls?
The Minie Ball was approximately the size of a quarter. In other words, it was BIG. It also tended to flatten on impact making it bigger yet. As a result, regardless of where it hit, it is going to cause massive amounts of damage.
As for today you can take your pick of ammunition (not so during the Civil War…the Minie Ball was about it). Depending on what you want to do there is ammo to fit your needs. I’ve heard (and I’m no expert so someone correct me if I’m wrong) that a .22 caliber bullet can be more lethal than some higher caliber ammunition. The hole it makes is small but it doesn’t have enough energy to travel out of the body so it stays inside bouncing around and causing damage.
You can get teflon (I think) bullets that will slice through body armor with no problem. However, since it travels right through people as well it doesn’t cause as much damage as the aforementioned .22. If you know your target is wearing body armor then this would be a good choice. If you know your target is not wearing body armor then this would be a bad choice.
I’ve also heard of some type of a ‘razor’ bullet that fragments into dozens of tiny, razor sharp pieces upon impact. Someone in the know about this stuff would have to elaborate though since I really am not certain.
In short I believe today’s ammunition covers a very wide range of possibilities. Depending on what you want to do I imagine you could find something even more lethal than a Minie Ball (I couldn’t say for certain but I think a Desert Eagle .44 puts mighty big holes in things…that gun is practically a cannon in its own right).
Modern military ammunition is specifically NOT allowed to do that. I believe fragmenting bullets are against the Geneva convention. Military ammunition is typically FMJ (Full Metal Jacket) to prevent that.
You’re probably thinking of the early M-16, which didn’t have as many twists in the barrel as later versions. Bullets from those guns tended to be a bit unstable, and would often tumble on impact, causing greater damage. However, it was also less accurate, so the rifling was tightened up on later versions. I don’t think the bullet tumble was ever an intentional effect.
I should have read Zarathustra’s question a bit more closely.
I’m not certain how modern military equipment measures up in terms of lethality.
At a guess I’d say a modern day M-16 is both more and less lethal than it’s Civil War counterpart.
More lethal beacuse it is MUCH more accurate.
More lethal because it has a MUCH greater effective range.
More lethal because it can be fired as an automatic weapon.
Less lethal because I think the caliber (5.56 mm) is much smaller than a Minie Ball.
Less lethal because I think the bullet velocity being greater in an M-16 gives it a better chance of passing right through the target.
Overall the M-16 is more lethal for the simple fact that you are likely to hit with it more often than you would with a musket. Otherwise we’d still be shooting Minie Balls in war.
Also, we now have this notion of a ‘nicer’ war that wasn’t really thought about back then. Diseased cows would be flung by catapult into castles to spread disease. Mustard gas was used in WWI. Fire bombs were used in WWII. Nowadays we seem to think in ‘nicer’ terms about war and aren’t supposed to use particularly nasty weapons even if we have them.
Here’s a link to stats on an M-16. I don’t know how make sense of all of that stuff but maybe someone else here can (in fact I’m certain of it if the right people peruse this thread and respond).
The international agreement against expanding bullets is the Hague Declaration of 1899. The later Hague convention is more vague about ammunition.
Teflon bullets that cut especially well throught body armor are an urban legend. A small company called KTW sold teflon-coated bullets to police departments for a while; the ammunition was designed to piece automobiles and used bronze- and brass-cored bullets which needed to be lubricated with teflon to avoid excessive wear on the weapon’s rifling.
A good page on the Minie Ball
Another thing that might have necessitated a lot of amputations was infection. Germ theory was not widely accepted at the time, and I think the grease grooves of these bullets probably carried a lot of pathogens.
Teach thy tongue to say ‘I don’t know.’ - Maimonides
The idea behind modern Geneva-compliant ammo. is to make holes in people, not cause unrepairable damage.
The FMJ bullets are more likely to go completely through people. While this makes it highly likely that the victim will die quicker of blood loss (twice as many holes), it also makes surgery much easier, as you don’t have the balooning/fragmenting effects assoc. w/ hollowpoint, etc., rounds (less likely to exit the body, but more likely to leave a lot of little pieces inside and cause wider damage).
As to the civil war medicine–
the horrors resulted from two/three main problems:
1. Lack of experienced field surgeons/field surgery techniques. The doctors who went out had, unfortunately, a LOT of trial-and-error practice, and by the end of the war knew a hell of a lot more about treating casualties than any physicians before them. So things started out really horrible and progressed to just mildly atrocious.
2. No understanding of germ/infection theory. Germ theory and ideas about infection and sterilization didn’t originate until the end of the war. As in previous wars, loss of life and limb from infection was very high. Bloodletting was still common practice. And they thought that a variety of diseases, from cholera to yellow fever to malaria, were caused by ventilation problems. (Hence malaria, “bad air”; they didn’t know that it wasn’t a result of the stinky swamps but rather the mosquitoes that bred in the stinky swamps.)
3. Supply problems. This was pronouncedly worse in the South, where Union blockades attempted to cut off all imports. They tried to look the other way when it came to people smuggling medicines and ether, but the rebs definitely had less anaesthetic to go around. So those horrors of amputation may have been worse down south.
Moving beyond the “facts” section of my reply to the “speculation” section, I’ll look at the OP. I think it would be very difficult in many cases to operate on an unanesthetized soldier. I read a bood, I think it was Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (different war, same sad story), in which the main character asks not to be chloroformed during surgery to remove shell fragments (or maybe it was French shrapnel). Anyway, he hates chloroform and asks to be conscious. The surgeon shrugs and starts poking around. The main charater is in so much pain over this that he violently intervenes. The surgeon’s response? “Chloroform the bastard!” (Eventually the protagonists convinces him to have another go without chloro, and somehow handles it fully conscious.)
Anyway, the point is that there is a big incentive for all concerned that the patient not feel the surgery. I mean, maybe those guys weren’t anesthetized in the modern sense (which often refers to a local numbing agent unless “general anesthesia” is specified), but if anything were available to knock those guys out, I would think army medicine would flock to it. The navies used to use rum.
I haven’t gone back to read all the sites in this thread but I will!
This concerns the problems which lead to amputations. True the whole problem with germs/bacteria was a consideration. It was not unusual to move a group of wounded into a horse barn, for example, and expose their open wounds to “lockjaw” all at one time (I can’t recall the medical word for “lockjaw” but we are now innoculated against it as children and regularly as we get older. It wasn’t the rusty nails that caused lockjaw, but the horse poop commonly found where ever rusty horse shoe nails were found.)
The whole problem with the damage cause by the impact of the miniball and other like weapons was that the tissue surrounding the wound was damaged, too. Understanding the damage that occurred to the area around the ball or bullet’s path didn’t come until the Korean War. Think of the way the water rises up after dropping a ball into a pool of water, not the central splash but the ring that rises around the ball and then spreads out into circles. That “pressure wave” occurs in flesh as well as water but in flesh the individual cells are ruptured. This flesh is now unsuitable for wound repair and perfect as as infection medium. If stitched the way surgeons in the 1860s thought it should be done that issue would sloth off, become gangrenous. They knew it was wiser to just remove the limb and for the times they lived in, it was.
Makes me wonder about those cowboy movies where the good guys just wrapped a hankie around the wounds and got right back on their horses and were playing guitar the next week!
I don’t know if the links have mentioned this, since I haven’t read them yet, but a slower-travelling ball, especially one cupped in a lubricated patch, typically did not heat up as much as a modern bullet as it went down the barrel and did not become sterilized. Kept in a filthy pocket and loaded by a person who may not have had a proper bath in his life, that could be a fine vector for soil diseases like tetenus.
The same logic, that it was too cool to be sterilized, was used to explain the ball passing through the scrotum of a soldier and into the cervix of a civilian woman, impregnating her. However, I’m not even dumb enough to fall for THAT one!
There were “Black Talon” bullets that would fragment into stuff resembling razor wire while bouncing around the innards of a victim. When they first hit the streets, doctors attempting to save the lives of young, urban shooting victims would often slice their own fingers to the bone while attempting to operate.
I don’t know if they were ever legal, but they did (and probably still do, somewhere) exist
I’m not so sure about the Miniball traveling too slowly to become sterilized in the rifle barrel.
This site about the miniball from Boris B said:
“…It was conical in shape and made of soft lead, with two or three grease grooves around its body. The cylinder-conical ball usually had a cavity. Upon firing, the hot gases produced by the burning black powder charge expanded into the hollow base of the ball, forcing the soft lead into the rifling grooves inside the barrel of the musket. These grooves, which spiraled as they traveled the length of the barrel, imparted a spin to the ball, making its range an incredible 1500…”
The forcing of the miniball into the rifling of the bun barrel should have cleaned it up, yes?
The Black Talon bullet actually existed and was perfectly legal. It was a pretty regular part of Winchester’s product line until it was withdrawn due to bad publicity; its replacement, the Ranger, is still available. The wounding effects of the Black Talon have been. described as “unremarkable” although they were designed to be have a new wounding mechanism. In any case, the rash of injuries among medical personnel simply never happened, at least according to Dr. Hargarten:
If anyone has documentation on a specific case, I’d like to hear it.
The Black Talon Legend is complicated by cross-fertilization with the Black Rhino Legend and the Teflon Bullet Legend. Mix all these together with a half a cup of credulity, and you get a an armor-piercing dum dum bullet which is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Kevlar-clad police officers as well as countless horned pachyderms.
Well, it might have cleaned it up a little, but not enough to prevent infections reliably. I think dropzone has the right idea - a bullet greased with animal fat, stored at room temperature in the gear of a muddy soldier exposed to lots of sick and dead people, would have to be a microbiological nightmare. I get the eeks just thinking about it. If it were shaped like a modern (non-grooved, jacketed) bullet, and fired at supersonic velocities down the hot barrel of a rapid-firing modern gun, it would probably get pretty clean. Pulling it out with sterile instruments, dressing the area with clean bandages, and making sure the patient didn’t sit in a trench next to last week’s shrapnel casualties would all drastically increase the odds for survival.
I’m not saying tissue damage wasn’t a big cause of Civil War amputations, I’m just saying …
:eek: infections! :eek:
What the hell I’ll do it anyway. A couple of years ago TLC or Discovery had a program called “Small Arms; Soft Bodies.” Or something like that. They had a whole bunch of doctors describing the types of wounds and affects that small arms and mines had on the human body.
One of the doctors mentioned that sometimes todays military rifles can shatter bones. Basically you have a very small bullet travelling at a very great speed. When it comes into contact with a bone it can often send bone fragments into the surrounding flesh.
Uh, and just to make this kinda applicable I think modern medicine would be better equipped to deal with “dirty” wounds caused by 1860’s weapondry.
There’s a Museum in Frederick MD dedicated to specifically just this topic: Civil War Medecine. They have books and a specifically produced video that is quite detailed. I highly recommend it.
The case is as the OP first heard it: anesthetics were widely available in the Union Army. The Confederates had them is lesser quantities due to the blockade and transportation difficulties. They developed a means to administer reasonably effective doses using smaller quantities --a sort of nasal inhaler, I believe.
FYI: To suture wounds, they would commonly use thread, string, or whatever they had available. Not being big on germ theory, this typically produced lots of “Laudable pus” (which was the term for an infection that supposedly indicated healing in progress). But given the volume of casualties, they’d often run out of suturing thread and look around them. One thing the battelfeilds did produce was a fair number of dead horses. They would use the long, thick hairs of the horse tails. BUt the hair is quite stiff, and so they’d boil it to soften it up. This also sterilized the material. The observation that wounds so sutured healed much faster and cleaner did give lots of credence to the germ theory.
