Medical opinions appreciated, gentlemen, but the case dates to the Civil War

[Bill in Oregon]

I'd be curious to hear current medical thinking regarding this musket ball wound suffered at Missionary Ridge, 25 November, 1863, by my great-great-great Uncle Lemuel Andrew Jackson Burks, Sergeant, Co. I, 27th Mississippi Infantry. The ball entered from the front and struck his clavicle, exiting out his back. He seemed to be recovering nicely when received at the Army hospital in Nashville in January 1864, but as the narrative reveals, the wound unexpectedly turned gangrenous. Despite the grim, painful, toxic treatment of bromine, this young man died, restless and exhausted, on Feb. 17. The attending surgeon removed the clavicle and forwarded the specimen to the Army Medical Museum. I have reached out to the museum, now at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, to see if there is any chance they still have the artifact in their collections.

[gamekeeper]

Bill, that's interesting and indeed very sad.
How did you come by the medical record of this tragic story?

[GunnyMack]

I'm no doctor but the first thing they would do nowadays is call the police to report a GSW, the police would then call a social worker who would then call the family who would call a lawyer who would then sue the shooter, manufacturer, government and the poor guy would still have died. And the family would still be hounded for years to pay the hospital tab.

All kidding aside, it's a wonder anyone survived the Revolutionary War or the Civil War.

[Ray]

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[Ray]

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[Ray]

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[Ray]

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[Bill in Oregon]

Many of your details of both battle and injury ring quite true, Ray. I have read descriptions of the piles of medical butchery outside the field hospitals at Gettysburg. I thank God I have only had to imagine it.

[Bill in Oregon]

By the way, I posed this question on another forum, and a doctor there responded that the bromine treatment itself could have caused multiple organ failure, so toxic is this disinfectant.

[Ray]

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[Bill in Oregon]

Thanks!

[mickbr]

great peice of history there Bill.

[Bill in Oregon]

Heard back from the museum -- this one is in Silver Spring, Md. -- that it is possible the bone is still in the collections. Waiting to hear more.
The referenced notes and woodcut are very likely from the six-volume "Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion" compiled in the dozen or so years after the conflict ended.