Civil War for the day

Denise Grady has an article in The New York Times about a gruesome exhibition in Philadelphia:

More than forty years after losing his right arm in the Civil War, Henry S. Huidekoper, a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army, had long since adjusted, and no longer found himself trying to reach for things or write with his missing hand. But somewhere in mind or memory, he was still whole. In 1906, he wrote in a letter: “In my dreams, I always have the use of both my hands.” He dreamed of himself as “a man with a perfect frame” whose struggle to write with the absent hand sometimes sparked phantom-limb pains that woke him in the night.
The letter is part of Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits, a permanent exhibition (photo, top) on Civil War medicine that opened last fall at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Many of the items being shown came from the back rooms and archives of the museum, which houses a trove of medical curiosities that inspired Pravda in 2008 to list the Mütter as one of the ten most horrible places in the world. Among its treasures are a collection of skulls, an enormously distended colon, some two thousand safety pins, bottle caps, and other objects removed from patients who had swallowed them, a death cast of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, a cancerous tumor excised from the mouth of President Grover Cleveland, slices of Einstein’s brain, and the Soap Lady, a nineteenth-century mummy whose body fat had turned waxy and soap-like from a chemical reaction after death.
The new exhibition focuses in part on Philadelphia’s role in the Civil War. It was not a battleground, but about 157,000 injured soldiers were transported here by train or steamboat for treatment. Though civilian clinics admitted some, a number of military hospitals were also built, including two that were almost cities unto themselves, each with more than three thousand beds.
On display are surgical instruments like a hammer and chisel, knives and saws used for amputations, and an unnervingly long pair of “ball forceps” for extracting bullets. Most of these grisly operations were done with the soldiers knocked out by chloroform or ether, the curators note— contrary to the common belief that there was no anesthesia back then, and only a bullet to bite on.
One display case holds the broken skull of a soldier who was shot through both eye sockets. Stark photographs (photo, above) reveal young men with limbs missing, faces mutilated, and piercing, haunted eyes. Others, still able-bodied, are shown burying the fallen.
There are samples, too, of the deceptively small object that killed or maimed so many: the Minié ball, a conical lead bullet with a hollow base that flattened on impact, splintering bone, tearing flesh and ripping huge, ragged exit wounds. Shots to the torso were often fatal. When limbs were hit, amputation was often the only remedy, and an estimated sixty thousand men lost arms or legs.
The poet Walt Whitman spent three years helping to care for the wounded in Washington, and in a letter to his mother he wrote: “One of the first things that met my eyes in camp, was a heap of feet, arms, legs” under a tree outside a hospital. The exhibition includes a photograph of one such heap.
At least three-quarters of a million soldiers died in the Civil War, and infectious diseases like dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia, malaria, and smallpox killed more than did wounds.
Some of the material focuses on African-American soldiers. Men of Color, To Arms! To Arms! Now or Never!, a recruiting poster exhorts. But blacks who answered the call were given inferior food, supplies, and medical care, and as a result had higher rates of disease than whites. Black soldiers were seven times as likely as whites to contract smallpox, probably because they were less likely to have been vaccinated. And one black regiment had one hundred and fifty deaths in a single summer from scurvy, or vitamin C deficiency, caused by a lack of fresh food.
Colonel Huidekoper, whose letter describes the dreams in which his missing arm is restored, was writing to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a surgeon who took care of the wounded in Philadelphia and developed an abiding interest in how his patients, especially amputees, fared in the years and decades after the war. The officer wrote that, after a Minié ball tore through his elbow, “a cord with a noose at the end of it, which I carried for the purpose, was used as a ligature”. He tried to keep fighting, but could not, so he walked a mile and a quarter to a field hospital and had his arm amputated, “never quite losing consciousness.”
Mitchell was among the first to recognize the phantom-limb syndrome and to understand that it resulted from injured nerves. Something of a pioneer in epidemiology, he sent detailed surveys to veterans, with many questions on pain and other consequences of amputation. “Of course it hurts,” one man replied in fine, bold penmanship, after describing the loss of both a leg and an arm. The museum has a collection of those completed surveys, but little use has been made of them so far, said Dr. Robert Hicks, the director.
Mitchell spent much of his career studying nerve injuries and wrote several books about them. He also became a novelist and had a short story published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1866, about a fictional Civil War doctor who is wounded and loses all four limbs.
The Mütter exhibition is not large and does not try to recount the entire Civil War, the major battles, or every aspect of medical care at the time. The intention, Dr. Hicks said, was to be thought-provoking, “a little bit emotionally raw,” and to give visitors “a kick in the gut.” That the exhibition does.

Rico says he's not sure he needs a kick in the gut, but it's still an exhibit he'd like to see... (And you could go ask Jim Mundy at the Union League to see their Civil War collection, the remains of the forever-departed and lamented Civil War Library & Museum, while you're downtown.)