Hello, I'm Robert Hicks and I'd like to present to you a short tour of our temporary exhibit,
"Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits: Injury, Death, and Healing in Civil War Philadelphia."
If the Civil War was happening today with the same proportion of casualties, we would
be witnessing between 8 and 10 million dead due to combat wounds, injuries, and disease.
Every family would be affected, and so it was in the 1860s when this war took place,
but Philadelphia has its own story. We wanted to focus on a few individuals whose experiences
reflect the larger picture: one White soldier, one Black soldier, one female nurse, one doctor,
and the voice of America's poet Walt Whitman. He made hundreds of visits to the hospital
to help those wounded men who were far away from home and family. He wrote poems after
the war and through the end of his life, the Civil War was predominant in his thoughts.
Why did we conceive the idea to do this exhibition in the first place? It all started with this
man and the letter to my left. This man's name is Henry Huidekoper and he was a very
young man at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. He was wounded at Gettysburg and
in fact he received the Medal of Honor for his actions on the first day of that battle.
But how did he get into this collection and what did he say? Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who
was a doctor during the Civil War and advanced the study of nerves, neurology. He and his
son put out a questionnaire to try to get answers from veterans, now decades after the
war, talking about how they would continue to live with the injuries that they had. Well
the postmaster of Philadelphia at the time was Henry Huidekoper. He responds to Mitchell
with a two page letter, it is type-written and the date is 1906. And he briefly mentions
what happened to him at Gettysburg, he was shot in the leg and he had an arm amputated
at the elbow. And he said, "After the war, I had some trouble with adjusting," and he
has this marvelous image of driving in a carriage, and he says, "A gust of wind blew off my straw
hat and I would reach up with my right arm that I no longer have to catch my hat." And
of course he didn't catch his hat. But he says in the letter, he learned to compensate
for that in time. And by the time he type-writes this letter, he's perfectly adjusted to life
with one arm. But he says, "Every night when I sleep, I have dreams and every time I dream,
I'm a man with two arms and two hands. And in my dreams, I enjoy taking a pen and writing,
and I'm writing the right hand that I no longer have. And when I have that dream, it induces
such a pain in my non-existent that it wakes me up in the middle of the night, even after
almost half a century." The fact that he felt a pain in the arm that's no longer there,
we now call the "phantom limb pain." The phantom limb syndrome comes from Dr. Mitchell and
his work on Civil War soldiers.When we saw that letter, we knew we had to do this exhibit.
In this exhibition, we wanted to focus on the White soldier and the Black soldier. The
Black soldier was known as the United States Colored Troop soldier. Well, we wanted personal
items from a Black soldier and a White soldier, and for a USCT soldier, we got this badge.
This was a badge was purchased and worn by veterans after the Civil War, and this was
owned by Presley Dawson or Presley Dorsey of the 43rd United States Colored Troops.
It was loaned to us by the grandson of this soldier. And I repeat grandson, not great-grandson,
which also illustrates that the Civil War is not ancient history, it's still within
the reach of public memory. This big drum is called a "spirometer." It would've had
two hoses, you breath in, you breath out, and it measures lung capacity. At the end
of the war, the army sent to all of the doctors in the regiments a kit to take in a variety
of measurements for both White and Black soldiers. Now, the army collected all this data for
a reason: what would these soldiers do when they leave the army? Particularly the Black
soldiers who would no longer return to slavery. It was thought that they would go to cities
and get jobs in factories, and for this purpose, a baseline fo industrial insurance was needed.
Well since we didn't know anything about Black soldiers, this was a major insight. And in
fact, the data collected on United States Colored Troops constitutes the first data
collected by the government to assess the health of African Americans in this country.
Two studies were created right after the Civil War. One study concluded that there was no
effective difference between White and Black soldiers in their performance on duty. The
second study had a different conclusion: the Black soldiers were inferior performers, which
is pretty strange when you think about all the manual labor that Black soldiers had to
do in creating fortifications, digging trenches, and so on. And yet, of those two studies,
the one study most influential over time was the one that found disparities. So the instrument
here is a component of what we can now call "racialized medicine." But the influence of
this kind of a study was pretty far-reaching. Even as late as World War II when we had the
famous Tuskegee Airmen, the Black soldiers who were recruited as fighter pilots, the
top brass of the army asked the question, "Can a Black man really operate a complex
machine such as an airplane?" Well when they looked for data on the performance of Black
soldiers, where did they get it? Well the last time the army had conducted any significant
study was the Civil War. So the data produced on Civil War soldiers had a long-lasting impact
in determining what kind of assignments Black soldiers would get in the military all the
way through World War II. This exhibition is not developed around any particular timeline,
we want people to imagine, "What would this be like if I had been there and had to participate
in these events?" So we've organized the exhibit very broadly around hurting, healing, dying,
the major experiences of soldiers. In the case here, we have a number of specimens that
have embedded bullets in them. These specimens were removed on the battlefield either from
soldiers who recovered and survived, or in some cases soldiers who had died and specimens
were sent to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, a storehouse for specimens that were gathering
during the war to help instruct military surgeons on what was happening and how to deal with
it. The minié ball is the bullet you see represented here. This was a bullet fired
from a rifled musket. It caused such extreme damage to the limbs, this is what required
all those amputations. These specimens are arranged over an image of the human body to
suggest to visitors what parts of the body these specimens come from. Here we have the
section on healing. Now these instruments at first glance may look pretty threatening
because they're pretty heavy duty and, yes, they're involved in cutting bone, cutting
flesh, amputation. But it's not only amputation. These tools are used for a variety of purposes,
the smaller ones used for many minor injuries. And it's a reminder that that one projectile,
the minié ball bullet, had such destructive power that in some cases amputation was the
only remedy. But amputation was not an easy decision to make and it was only when other
possibilities failed that they resorted to this. A physician on the battlefield has approximately
90 seconds to consider the patient that's been brought before him, make life decisions
about what to do, and if it's a decision to sacrifice a limb, that is of course gonna
affect that patient for the rest of his days. We did want to put to bed a common myth that
in the Civil War, doctors performed bloody amputations without anesthesia. This is not
true and it is also not true that soldiers "bit the bullet" in order to stave off the
pain. In 95% of all surgeries, anesthesia was used, either ether or chloroform. It's
only in those 5% of the cases where it was simply not available and time was of the essence
did the surgeries take place without them. It's true that the war did not produce new
medicines for us, but it did produce a lot of knowledge about surgery and a lot of knowledge
that increased our understanding of how the body works. If you see an ambulance take an
injured person to emergency medical care today, we expect that person is going to arrive at
the hospital and receive treatment from a battery of professionals assessing all dimensions
of that person's health.That system of emergency medical care that we now take for granted
was in fact the chief invention of the Civil War. Before the war, if you were injured or
sick, the doctor came to you at your home. You did not go to a hospital, a hospital was
known as a place where people went to die. So soldiers who were wounded coming into hospitals,
maybe for the first times in their lives, are getting a different orientation. Hospitals
are here to rehabilitate, repair, and send a soldier back to productive duty if possible.
We've shown you some instruments that you probably expected to see, cutting instruments
for amputations for example. But we wanted to put out a few instruments that represent
some areas of medicine that may be unfamiliar to you. For example, there's an item that
is worn about the wrist called a "sphygmograph" that is wound up. It's mechanical and it creates
a little strip chart recording of a pulse. So even in the Civil War, they're gathering
data in the form of graphic displays of bodily functions. Also, we have what's called a "Magneto
electric generator." This is a hand-cranked device that generates its own alternating
current. Now this was not standard issue in the army, but in Philadelphia, there was a
specialty hospital designed to look at soldiers with nerve injuries, and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell
with a team of doctors investigated these cases of damaged nerves, and they began to
use electricity both to explore how the nerves functioned in the first place, and also how
to remedy damaged nerves and reactivate them if they seem to have gone lifeless. Also in
this case, we have a prosthetic limb and, as you might expect with all those amputations,
there was a big demand. And manufacturers vied with each other to present the government
with models that were functional and comfortable to wear. And in some cases, we know that amputations
themselves were conducted in particular ways with the idea of wearing a prosthetic limb
comfortably afterwards. Also in this case, we have things that everybody would recognize:
a hypodermic syringe and a thermometer. And this particular thermometer is bent, and that
is intentional because it's not placed in the mouth, but in the armpit. We also have
in this case a very early hypodermic syringe, but it's not used exactly the same way as
getting a shot is today at the doctor's office. A small lancet would be first used to cut
the skin, then the needle would be introduced into that cut, and the doctor would slowly
inject the solution of morphine directly into the body. And then it would be removed and
that cut would be bandaged. In addition to all those battlefield injuries, disease was
also a problem. These long glass tubes contained specimens that represent the appearance of
dysentery, lesions in the digestive tract. So specimens such as these were also collected
and saved during the Civil War to study the phenomena, also to preserve specimens against
a future date, when cures and new medicines might come into play. But also in those days,
it was possible to vaccinate against one disease: smallpox. There were multiple outbreaks in
the Southern states and the Confederacy had a difficult time finding vaccines. Well you
see on display a small device that looks a chrome-played stapler. It's actually a device
for early vaccination. It's meant to be used to prick a pustule on a person suffering from
a mild form of smallpox, remove a little bit of the fluid from the sore, and then go to
a healthy person and jab them with it with the idea that they get a very mild form of
the disease, but after they recover, they're immune from smallpox. I'm standing in front
of the Amputation Booth, this is the one interactive of this Civil War exhibit. A person will enter
some data about themselves on this keypad here: their height, their sex, their skin
tone. They enter this booth and they stand on a pair of green footprints that align themselves
with a full length mirror. But in place of their right arm, they see a computer-generated
arm. And the idea is, over the course of about two and a half minutes, they watch what happens
when a minié ball strikes the arm. The arm is wounded and it becomes infected as the
gangrene sets in and becomes worse, so the arm is amputated. There's healing and then
a prosthetic limb applied. And later, the phantom limb syndrome makes itself apparent.
Well this concludes our small tour of Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits. We know that you
are not able to see this exhibit, but if you're interested in more, we also have posted to
the web 9 videos, a medical historical travelogue of Civil War Philadelphia. If you are a student
or a teacher or you're an undergraduate, you might be interested in our set of 10 online
lesson plans. These lesson plans span a variety of activities connected with Civil War medicine,
from how to amputate to the health of the United States Colored Troop soldier. These
are designed to focus on becoming acquainted with primary sources in the history of medicine
so it puts you in the front lines of the Civil War. Thank you again for visiting!