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, he died 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.

What about current medical thinking?

A musket ball usually had wadding and would often pull part of the victim's clothing into the wound.

The drawing looks a lot like osteomyelitis, which is an infection of the bone.

Sometimes people live with long drawn out waxing/waning infections in the bone, sometimes they become septic.

I would feel that placing a concentrated bromide solution on the inside of the wound and bone would likely be putting the patient at risk of multi organ failure.

It looks to me like either he developed sepsis and went to multi organ failure and died, or he had failure due to toxic effects of his treatment and died. Given the location of the clavicle and its proximity to the lung, that may well have caused the pneumonitis that they stated killed him.

As to whether they still have the specimen, I would tend to expect so as they don't typically destroy these things... but they most likely would claim it lost if they cannot find it. It would not be unusual for a specimen to end up in a collection of items and lose any identification as to its origin.

At least you have some knowledge of what happened to your kin from that war. All I know of my relatives who died there on my mom's side was that they "fell at ___" There were about a dozen of them.

CR: Thanks for your thoughts on this matter.
It is unclear to me whether "musket ball" refers to a patched round ball or more likely a conical Minié, but realize that a great deal of the infection and suffering in 19th-century warfare was caused by projectiles driving germ-infested clothing and other contamination deep inside the body. What a mercy that they gave Uncle Lem ether and chloroform before applying the bromine/bromide. I assume they would have opened up the wound to gain access for the treatment.
My father's side of the family was staunchly Yankee; my mother's mostly Reb. The slaughter and misery both sides inflicted on each other remains heartbreaking to this day, but slavery had to be destroyed.

Bill, I will have to look, but I have a copy of a letter that one of my ancestors wrote to his brother after the battle of Gettysburg. He was a field surgeon + in his letter he describes the battle + hospital conditions. My aunt made copies before donating the original letter to the Gettysburg museum.

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 aver the conflict ended.

My guess is the infection was caused by the lubricant used on the minie ball or patch. probably animal-fat based and undoubtedly full of bacteria before firing .

In todays world you just wouldnt get those infections but battlefield hygeine back then didnt exist...

Bill, or as Granny Clampett would say, "the war between America + Yankee aggression."

Uncle Lem's clavicle was "deaccessioned" along with a couple of thousand other parts from Civil War victims in the museum's collection, staff tell me. Unfortunately, there is no record of how, when or where the bones were disposed of.
The note and woodcut are from the multi-volume "Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion."
If you need more sadness in your life -- or are unconvinced that humans do terrible things to other humans -- here is a link to this astonishing archive:
https://collections.nlm.nih.go...muid-14121350R-mvset