[The following takes place during the American Civil War.]
The key to a successful amputation hinged on doing it quickly to prevent shock and excessive bleeding. But inexperienced battle surgeons like Baylis, not knowing this, often prolonged the process and sometimes stopped sawing to gaze at the twitching nerves and muscles. The soldiers were remarkable in their restraint. To scream was considered cowardly and dishonorable. Those who sobbed were usually delirious in their pleas for help. The severed arms and legs were stacked against the side of the bark like firewood. The limbs signified the pain and suffering of a war that Newton had opposed from the outset, and they must have made the pretty, abstract words of the Van Dorns and Maurys sound not only hollow, but obscene.
Conditions were just as horrifying for the Union wounded at the Tishomingo Hotel, where nurses in aprons seemed to Hugh Carlisle of the 81st Ohio to be “colored in blood from their necks to their hems.” Carlisle was fortunate; a Minié ball had struck his bayonet before ricocheting into his thigh. His bayonet was bent into a circle, but his thighbone was undamaged. A surgeon fingered the wound, stuffed some cloth into it, and poured cold water on it. It was all the treatment he got – three days later, he would pull the dressing out himself.
After the battle, Carlisle lay on the floor of the hotel near the amputating table and watched the surgeons operate through the night.
”They would cut off an arm or leg, take it by the thumb or toe, and pitch it over the porch into the street,” he wrote.
Source:
Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “Corinth.” The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy. Anchor Books, 2010. 27-8. Print.
Further Reading:
How gruesome. Cutting your losses even extends to medicine. Do keep sharing these, They are amazing.