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- Feb 5, 2017
From the National Museum of Civil War Medicine (with permission). I might have posted about this many years ago, but didn't have this picture! He was amazingly lucky - his intestines were somehow not pierced - that's the only way he survived.
The patient "was completely disemboweled, his intestines covered with dust, hen-grass, sand and grit."
Drs. Thomas and William Amiss, brothers and surgeons in the Confederate army, were staring down at an artillery officer whose abdomen had been opened by shrapnel.
Putting on a brave face, their patient Maj. Richard Snowden Andrews insisted "if you damned doctors would do something for me I'd get well."
The chance of survival was vanishingly slim, and one of Andrews' brother officers "thought twas impossible he could live more than an hour."
Andrews' wife later described the treatment at a field hospital: "[The surgeon] washed out grit and bits of cloth from the wound and proceeded to sew it up, using the only needle he had, which was a rusty one...Then he was placed on the bed, and there was no further treatment possible, except applications of cold water."
It was a miraculous recovery:
"It was in the course of four or five weeks that the great chasm in his side was sufficiently healed for him to sit up, and in six weeks he was dressed and on the porch, and able to move about slowly on crutches."
He would live for another forty years.
Sources:
Robert R. Krick, "Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain," University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill, 1990, pages 379-380.
"Richard Snowden Andrews, Lieutenant Colonel Commanding the First Maryland Artillery Confederate States Army; A Memoir," Tunstall Smith editor, Sun Job Printing Office, 1910.
Image credit:
Richard Snowden Andrew's uniform jacket, Maryland Historical Society collection via Baltimore Magazine, photograph by David Colwell, "Articles of War," April 2011, accessed September 8, 2022, <https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/community/articles-of-war/>.
The patient "was completely disemboweled, his intestines covered with dust, hen-grass, sand and grit."
Drs. Thomas and William Amiss, brothers and surgeons in the Confederate army, were staring down at an artillery officer whose abdomen had been opened by shrapnel.
Putting on a brave face, their patient Maj. Richard Snowden Andrews insisted "if you damned doctors would do something for me I'd get well."
The chance of survival was vanishingly slim, and one of Andrews' brother officers "thought twas impossible he could live more than an hour."
Andrews' wife later described the treatment at a field hospital: "[The surgeon] washed out grit and bits of cloth from the wound and proceeded to sew it up, using the only needle he had, which was a rusty one...Then he was placed on the bed, and there was no further treatment possible, except applications of cold water."
It was a miraculous recovery:
"It was in the course of four or five weeks that the great chasm in his side was sufficiently healed for him to sit up, and in six weeks he was dressed and on the porch, and able to move about slowly on crutches."
He would live for another forty years.
Sources:
Robert R. Krick, "Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain," University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill, 1990, pages 379-380.
"Richard Snowden Andrews, Lieutenant Colonel Commanding the First Maryland Artillery Confederate States Army; A Memoir," Tunstall Smith editor, Sun Job Printing Office, 1910.
Image credit:
Richard Snowden Andrew's uniform jacket, Maryland Historical Society collection via Baltimore Magazine, photograph by David Colwell, "Articles of War," April 2011, accessed September 8, 2022, <https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/community/articles-of-war/>.
Bringing the