Armistead: A Surgeon's Morning Work

A Surgeon’s Morning Work

Kilrain a confederate soldier was wounded at Little Round Top defending it, he was shot at the side of his stomach. He was taken to a hospital in an ambulance where he began to feel weak from the loss of blood. The bullet would’ve hit the lower part of his rib cage, it would’ve shattered his ribs and throw them towards tissue, possibly hitting his kidney which is a very serious injury, but surgeons during the Civil War didn’t have x-ray machines yet so they couldn’t tell where the bullet was, so they would just have to check around the entrance wound and dig around for the bullet. They would’ve given him an anesthetic drug like Opium, Ether, or Chloroform to deal …show more content…
The bullet would’ve shattered part of the upper half of his rib cage, launching shards of bone with the flatten out bullet hitting Armistead’s lungs. After that he start to suffer from low oxygen then he go unconscious and die from lack of oxygen, or he’d die from bleeding out from the tissue and muscle being torn. So the surgeon wouldn't have been able to do anything Armistead was a lost cause and if by some miracle the surgeon did save him the dirty tools that went inside him to take out the bullets or the dirty bandage would’ve given him an infection so either way not much to do for poor Armistead. If both Kilrain and Armistead were shot we know they were obviously in the middle of a gun fight and if they were both using standard musket balls instead of minie balls chances are they both lost that gun fight because the minie ball could be reloaded 8x faster not to mention its superior accuracy, power, and its range it could shoot over 600 yards, a standard rifle could shoot over 300