![]() ![]() Like most historical myths, it believes that our ancestors were much, much less intelligent than we.īeing a Respiratory Therapist in my real world job, and a Confederate Doctor at events, I love the bite the bullet myth and usually address it when asked…my take is that pre modern age, teeth were not a thing to be taken lightly and without floride in the toothpastes were pretty soft in comparison to a hard lead bullet. Soldiers certainly did lose limbs, but the circumstances were not as primitive as the movies would lead us to believe.ĪLZ Comments: Another historical myth that frosts my clock. i wonder how few really lost limbs, after reading this. i remember seeing a house in a tour of a civil war battlefield that they indicated was used as a hospital for wounded. also they make you feel that the conditions of surgery was barbaric. yes, the movies have influenced my thinking. So the absence of anesthesia is a myth if it’s said to pertain to the Civil War, but true during the Revolutionary War. A stick would probably have been used to keep someone from biting his tongue off.” And no again, they didn’t give someone a bullet to bite on…when someone cuts into you, you scream, and that bullet goes down the gullet. Besides, being drunk doesn’t dull the pain, it only changes your reaction to it. They would not have wanted their patient to bleed to death. Alcohol dilates the blood vessels and they knew that. And the alcohol thing is Hollywood history. It was actually quite an intricate procedure involving skin and muscle knives, muscle retractors, saws, cauterizing irons, etc. First, despite popular belief, they did not just take a hacksaw to peoples’ limbs. There are actually a couple of misconceptions here. Something “we heard all the time that was patently false was that they would get soldiers rip roaring drunk before amputating an arm or a leg. Ben Swenson, a historian and re-enactor who worked at Yorktown, VA, a Revolutionary War site, says visitors often approached him with incorrect assumptions. ![]() Other medical misconceptions from the pre-anesthesia era abound. See īut neither ether nor chloroform was available before the 1840s, so Revolutionary War-era medical practices did not include the use of anesthetics. It is estimated that greater than 90% of all major surgery was carried out with anesthetics. (Both had been used since the 1840s.) Major surgery was carried out using these anesthetics if they were available. ![]() Gaseous ether and chloroform were both widely available and their therapeutic impact was well known in both Union and Confederate medical services. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, MD, tries to debunk the widespread medical myth that anesthesia did not exist during the Civil War. ![]()
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