Cspan3. Every july for the past 25 years, the Gettysburg Anniversary Committee has hosted a civil war battle reenactment and living history village depicting camp life. Next, we visit a union army surgeon and embalmer and talk to reenactors about medical practices during the war. During the very beginning of the war, like i said, maybe around 1860, when there were a lot of quack surgeons in the union army, dr. Letterman in 1862 at an teem took over the medical corps. Now he created an ambulance corps where we could get the men off the battlefield quicker and faster. He also went and had to give tests to surgeons to be army qualified surgeons. Thats where it got better and better in the service. 3 million fought, 600,000 died in it. 700,000 carry wounds off that battlefield. So what happens there is what i was dealing with at that time was really, boy, the musket went in like a finger and came out like a fist. It shattered that bone so bad, there was no way i could repair it whatsoever. Even if you got shot with one of them today in modern medicine, they would is to amputate because they blew the bone apart completely. But the survival rate was great off the table, off the amputations. 70 survived the amputations off this table, but then it decreased down to about 60 due to the fact of disease that set in. That soldier came to my table on the morning, the first one. There was nothing wrong with him, no disease, no blood poison in his system. His survival rate was great, about 70 . But then f the next soldier came to my table and he had blood poisoning, bone disease, im going to transmit it to the next soldier. If im here hoperating here, we have blood, body parts. If i drop my amputating nife on the ground, i pick it up, wipe it off, and continue doing what im doing. Thats it. Civilization didnt come in. You see how dirty they are, thats how i would use them from one soldier to next. Civilization didnt come in until around 1865, then all of a sudden, it was altogether different. If i would have had it during the civil war, a lot more soldiers lives would have been saved. Due to the fact of that sterilization. We had pain killers, opium, we also put them to sleep. A lot of people didnt realize that. We had chloroform and ether. Placed over the face, it would put him out for about 15 minutes. I can amputate around arm or leg in five minutes. The faster we did it, the better his survival rate was, we figured. A lot of things happened around 1862. A lot of the soldiers were laying on the battlefield for 48 hours and longer. We had the soldier came blue masked. Soldier came to me in the morning. My sign on the other side says the surgeon is not in. Take two blue blue masks and see me in the morning. The soldier says, doc, i havent gone to the bathroom in a while you got something for me . I take one part of this, to two parts of water, have him drink it. Its going to make him go, but whats in there, blue chalk and mercury. If i keep giving him that, you know whats going to happen . Hes go to go crazy. I had to watch exactly what i becau was doing with that. Too much could really do them harm. We bled them. We had leeches, too. We did that, too. Did you realize the danger of the blue mass at the time . No, we didnt. The whole situation was mercury content was almost like our wonder drug. We thought it was a miracle drug. And a lot of my medicines over here were laced with it. We had pain killers, like i said, opium, morphine, and laudnum. You wont feel anything the rest of the day. Do it. All right. Okay, you know what the contents is . Alcohol, 45 . Grain opium, 45. 6 grams. Okay. Thats whats in here. Okay. The reason why we put whiskey with it is because opium raw was very bitter. You wanted to take the bitterness away from it, so we added the alcohol to it. Actually, the surgeon drank more of the alcohol. Another thing we used, you know what this is . It is creosote. The same stuff you use on a telephone pole. Come to the General Hospital, the surgeon would come and open up the stomach and seen them blue spots, tark spots around the stomach. All of a sudden he realized thats gangrene setting in. He paints the stump with creosote. It stops the spread of the gangrene, but it burned when you put it on. We had a lot of whiskey, too. We had whiskey. Lincoln sent it to my by the barrel. The fact is we used a lot of it for shock. You know, but like i said before, the majority of the time, the surgeons drank it. Because of the fact is the pressure during the day, we had pure alcohol, too. Heres another thing we would do. If i would come to the if i would come to the General Hospital, i would come to the General Hospital and you would open up the stump and stuff like this, and all of a sudden, the stump needed to be bled because it was that tainted blood that was in there, so we would put a stump in a bleeder pan like this, take the bleeder like this, give them a little cut, and let them bleed until it stopped. Then we would bandage them back up again and maybe a couple days later check again. If he still needed to be bled, we could hang a couple leeches on him and let the leeches suck out the tainted blood. Ill ask you a question while ive got you here. You, young man. After i amputated arms and legs, okay, and i would suture them. You know what suturing is. I would sew them shut. All of a sudden, i find out im running out of suture thread. I got to use something else. What could i have used at that time . Other than suture thread . Yeah. I dont have no thread. Its in my other case. Silk thread is what i used. I didnt use cotton thread because it would tear too easily. Silk thread was the thing, but i ran out of it. Now i got a soldier here on the table. I have to suture his stomach, but i dont have silk thread anymore. Coulds you have used horses hair . You got it, the tail of a horse. Thats it, the tail of a horse. Its pliable. Works good, strong. We used a lot of that, and there were a lot of oehorses for me t get it. The confederacy used a lot of it because of the blockade lincoln had along the coast. They couldnt get it, unless they overran some of our supply wagons. But they didnt like it because it was so coarse. What they were doing, they were boiling it, and they would suture some of the confederate troops shut. What they didnt realize at the time was it was healing quicker and faster. They didnt realize they were sterilizing the horse hair, and the union army picked it up later in the war and started sterilizing the horse hair when they started suturing. Ill ask you another question, young man. Okay. I dealt with chickenpox and measles and mumps. Okay. Who got the most when they enlisted into the army, who got the measles and mumps . The country boys or the city boys who got them . Country boys. Why . Country boys. Country boys, you absolutely agree . City boys. City boys. Everybody agree on country boys. One guy says city boys. Well, young man back there, youre wrong. It was the country boys that got it. The reason for that is the reason for that is the city boys were raised in the city. They built up an immunity against the disease because they were close, like you are today right here. But the country boys lived on a farm like down here. They didnt get off the farm very often to build an immunity up. When they got into the army, here they are with the city boys carrying the measles and bumps and chickenpox. And they contacted them. This is what we had to deal with it. It was the country boys that got them. Okay. You were close. We did three types of amputations. We did the circular amputation called the guillotine or the double flap amputation or the single flap amputation. The single flap amputation was used to take your foot and your hand off. Now, i prefer myself to use the circular amp titiutation becaus worked faster and quicker and made a nice stump for an artificial leg when you got one. Theamputation, well, you had the guillotine knife, sharpened both sides. This is what we did. We would get ahold of the tissue, pull it up off the femur, and go in here like this, right above the femur, and cut upward, and then we would pull the flap back. Then my assistant would hold the leg up and i would go underneath and make another flap and pull the two flaps back to expose the femur. And after i exposed the femur a bit like that, i would take my saw, take this one, take my capital saw, and i would start sawing through it. Okay. And it had a tendency sometimes when you did that, it would snap, like you took a 2 x 4 and saw it, and you have a flange on it, so what would happen, you would have a flange on the end of the femur. We didnt want that so what we would do then, we would take the bone knipper, which is here, and we would nip all the way around here to make it clean. Then, we had a bone file. Which is this. And we would file this completely around, make it nice and smooth because we didnt want anything else. And after we did that, we had a bone brush. We would take the bone brush, and we would brush it clean all the way around to make it smooth, and then we would take the femur and take the artery, force it, and we would pull out the femoral arty, pull it out of the stump. We tied it aufoff, we didnt cauterize like in the rev revolutionary war. They would have a frying pan and it would get hot and they would take the cast iron and slap it against the stump and it would cauterize the small ends. We dont do that anymore. We advanced a little longer. When we would pull it out, then we would take silk thread, which is in my other case. We would take the silk thread and then we would thread it, you know, and tie it off and stuff like this. Then we would take the stump and then we would take the two flaps together, and it made it thick like this because we would suture it around. Thats why when it had tenancy to bleed a lot because you put a lot of pressure on it. I loved the circular amputation. Or the guillotine as we call it, you would cut a complete circle. Take your knife and cut like this all the way around. Thats your circular cut. Then we would pull the skin off, pull the skin both on both sides, and then after we did that, then we would cut through the tissue and go down and around, and then we would pull the tissue off the bone, and then we would do the same principle, pull out the femoral artery, tie it off and Everything Else like that. Then what we would do is we would tie off the artery, pull it down, and then what we would do, we would pack it with alum because what would happen, it would seal up the small veins in there, and then we would take it like this, and we would pull the skin over, over the top of the stump. Then what we would do is take four knot suture tie, what i mean by that is we would suture, tie a not, suture, tie a knot, suture, tie a knot. Four knots across here and the suture, and then plaster adh adhesi adhesives, and we would put them between each of them. Then we would seal that up. The femoral artery, we would tie that like i said before, but we would let it hang out. Let it hang out of the stump and the bandages and stuff. What would happen then after that was when you went to the General Hospital, if the surgeon came around too soon and too fast and it didnt heal, and he would tug on the suture thread, he could open that up, the femoral artery, and soldier starts hemorrhaging and bleeding. No way he could get all those sutures out of there, untie it, then get back and tie it. The soldier would probably hemorrhage and bleed to death. You had to watch what you were doing when you were in there. Wow. Thank you. Youre welcome. That was explained beautifully. Thank you. Thank you. Next time, lay on the table and ill demonstrate for real. Thats all right. Another time. This is a giggly saw. See that . The reason for that is in 1863, we started saving arms and legs instead of cutting them off. What we would do now, we would cut down. Well pretend this is the leg, this is the femur. We would cut down. The damaged part is in here. We would cut down through the tissue, through the thing, and then we would clean this all out and pull it off. Pull it off. We wouldnt cut through, now, we didnt go down to the bottom. We just went down to the bone pit, the damaged part, over here, and cut down. Now we take our giggly saw, and we would unhook it, and then what we would do is put a suture thread on here and a needle. And we would go through here, underneath. And we would come up and then we would saw this way. And go over here and saw up this way. And then it would make a smooth cut like this. Then we would take all that damaged part out of there, clean it out and stuff like this. Put it through. And then we would take it and push this together. Bring it together. Then we take and drill holes in it, and then we would take silver wire, which is this, and wire it together. Maybe by coincidence, maybe by coincidence, i had no knowledge of how to put nerves together. How to put veins together, but he still had blood circulation because this was connected yet down here. See this tissue. Okay, it was still connected down here. Maybe by a chance, when we push it together, the veins come together and connected. And you had more feeling through the leg. We got better and better and better at it as the years went by. And quicker at it, that we saved a lot more arms and legs. When youre putting it together, he had like a bolt down here, but at least he had use of it, you know, to use it. Okay. Soldier laying on the table, when you see a movie, he gets up and hes yelling and screaming and Everything Else. It didnt happen. Didnt happen. This is what i believe. We had eight stations set up near the battlefield. There were assistant surgeons out there. They were administering opium and morphine out there. By the time he came to my operating table, he could be laying there and he would get pain killers again. By the time he gets to my table, he doesnt know where the hell hes at. Now im going to feed him more. Im going to put him to sleep, cut his leg off, cut his arms off. Now i believe this, when i took my ammonia water, i place it under his nose. He starts waking up. Starts sitting up, we sit him up to get fresh air into his lungs. He looks down and theres two legs missing. Hes going to yell and scream and carry on like you wouldnt believe. Why . These are country boys. These are boys that need their arms and legs to work the farm. What are they going to do now . I think thats the biggest shock that you can have. Theres no way, 90 of all the amputations done on the table in union army were used with chloroform and ether. We had an adequate supply. The confederacy had a hard time getting it because of the block blockaid lincoln had along the coast. The only possibility is if they overrun our wagons and get it that way. This i believe they did, they did put a stick in their mouth when they operated. They were drugged, too. They were drugged up, but they could feel it. Thats why some were groaning and moaning on the table. Heres another disbelief. Theres no way that i researched or even my assistant surgeon over there researched anything that came up about biting a bullet. They say a soldier laying on the table, hes biting the bullet. I put this bullet in his mouth. And all of a sudden, what happens, i start thinking hes feeling it. Hes going to go and whats going to happen. Hes going to swallow this and choke to death because of the bullet going down. We didnt find any documentations where there was biting on the bullet. People say i was out in the field y found a bullet near a hospital and there were teeth marks on it. This is what i belief. I believe near the hospital and later on, there were farmlands, pigs are running around, Everything Else, and the pigs pick them up and bite on them and drop them. 20 years from now, you come around, and all of a sudden you find this bullet and say oh, my god, theres a bull lt some soldier bit on. Thats my belief because we dont have any dumatie atio doc that said they were biting on the bullet. The reason i have a flag here, its remembrance of the first officer to die in the civil war. Colonel alsworth. He inherited the confederacy so he led a troop to get the ground war started. The union army not the war would last two months, maybe three at the most. When you get in, all he could find was the Confederate Flag flying over a military establishment. Everybody thinks this here is the Confederate Flag. This is not what the colonel had taken down from the tavern. That is the First OfficialConfederate Flag. Seven states, seven stars. Thats what the colonel had taken down from the tavern. As he was taking down the steps, the tavern owner became irate about the situation, reached under the bar and pulled a shotgun out and shot him in the chest. He did it in front of the colon colonels men so he got shot five times and stabbed seven. Left him lie on the floor and took the colonel back to washington, d. C. And put him at the shipyard. The word of his death spread quickly through washington, d. C. , and the doctor went to the president and asked for permission to embalm the body. The doctor had taken a number of friends with him, after three hours of talking, finally persuaded the president , the father of everyone in the military because he was commander in chief. The president said go ahead and embalm the body. He proceeded to embalm the body and sent word to the white house it was done. He lied. He was not done. But when the president heard they were done embalming the body, the president and mrs. Lincoln stopped doing what they were doing, immediately went to the firehouse. It came out the colonel was a close friend to the president and mrs. Lincoln, had smepent my hours entertaining the president and his children. Thats why they immediately went to the firehouse. As the carriage arrived, the doc had just gotten done washing the body, and it was laying there naked. Luckily for the doctor, there had been a bunch of fires twarg the firehouse and they dragged the flag up to the colonels shoulders. Mrs. Lincoln is quotied as sayig it looks like he was asleep. He lay for a ecwoo in washing n washington, d. C. For a week, and albany reported this man had been dead for two and a half weeks. There are no signs of death, no smelling, no color change, no sme smell. It looked like he was still asleep. Thats how the average person found out about embalming. Dr. Holmes did it free of charge and proceeded to charge 100 a person thereafter, as much as 300 for a general. Okay. These are tools of the embalming trade of 1861. This is a gravity bottle. It works on the principle, for every foot above the body is a pound of pressure. It takes less than five pounds of pressure to preserve a dead person. The gravity system was used in 1701 by a doctor, the first recorded arterial embalmer. The gravity system is still being used in some Funeral Homes in 2019. These tools are used in all Funeral Homes in 2019. The only thing that changed embalming in the last 300 years are the chemicals you use. Its done exactly the same way. There was no Chemical Company selling embalming fluid until 1888 when dodge started selling formaldehyde. It was not patented until two years after the civil war. Arterial embalming is a simple procedure. I like using the carotid artery in the neck. Make a simple incision in the neck, pull the artery up, and put a notch in the carotid artery. Stick that in the carotid artery. Beside that is the jugular vein. You cut it off completely. The reason is i want to push all the blood out of the body. When i get the embalming fluid to come out, im done. Very easy to know if youre done. During the civil war, if a dr. Had four or five to do, he would hook them up and make a pile of money. No, they could not do that. Morticians in 2019 still cannot do that. We and still only do one person at a time. You have to stay with the person and give them a massage. The reason being we want to help move the fluid through the body. How we know where its at, its not the tissue becomes rigid. It becomes rigid, but the lower part hasnt. We now have a blood clot we have to get rid of. You stick this in your jugular vein. Work it back and forth. You get blood to come on back. Back then, you massage and hit another spot. Work the vac pump. Continue doing that. Eventually get the embalming fluid to come out. Good, then youre done with art arterial embalming but theres one part of the body that doesnt use blood, and thats where decomposition starts first. We have to take care of that area separately. A place that doesnt use blood is your stomach. We have todfood and acid in our stomach. Now comes the messy part of the job. Theres two openings. You plug the throat, and when you force everything out the rectum, you plug the rectum, then you inject into the kidneys and inject into the lungs to make sure they have fluid. Now the person is completely preserved. There was little less than 20,000 soldiers receiving embalming in the civil war out of 640,000 because how you took someone who died of disease. Thats the one reason for death. Nobody told you about the third biggest reason for death in the civil car. It was a man on both sides. They called him the cook. It was always a womans job back home. So the woman is cooking for us. The come cooking for them. All right. Fred cook and the battlefield got him. You take some horse hair or silk and tie off the artery at that hole and take a directory probe and stick it in the artery and the other side of that bullet hole and take a different tube, hook it on your hose and slide it right in. Then continue to do the embalming. That is your bullet holes and done pull it out and tie it off. Simple and easy. We do not need to be embalmed to be buried in america if youre buried within 48 hours. Any questions . Thank you very much. Thank you. You could watch this and other american artifacts programs by visiting our website, cspan. Org history. Weeknight this is month, were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on cspan3. Tonight at 8 00 eastern, a look at korean war oral history. A veteran recounts his part in the Amphibious Landing at a victory for u. N. Forces which turned the side early in the war. He also talks about the surprise chinese counter attack and intense combat at the battle of a reservoir where he was captured. Watch korean war oral histories tonight at 8 00 on cspan3. Cspan has unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme Court and Public Policy events. You could watch all of cspans Public Affairs programming on television, online, or listen on