‘Mrs Lavelle!’ was all Dr Sawyer then said.
Ellen had assisted him previously on other operations and knew what was required. Quickly, she swabbed away the matted blood from the boy’s shattered hip. She looked at the doctor for affirmation that his point of incision was now clearly visible. He nodded. Then Ellen slipped one of her hands under the boy’s buttock, the other one meeting it from the top. Her hands, stretched to their limit formed a human tourniquet. Her job, to stop all blood to the site of amputation. Thumbs meeting she pressed hard, clamping the thigh, praying to God for the strength to maintain the pressure. If everything went to plan it would be over in less than three minutes. Dr Sawyer was quick. Time being of the essence.
She closed her eyes thinking of nothing else but the exertion of her hands.
The technique the doctor would use was the oval method. This, though similar to the older, circular technique, lent itself better to amputation through the joint capsule – the cut made higher on one side of the limb than the other. Using the ebony-handled Lister amputation knife handed him by Louisa, Dr Sawyer made the incision in the Rhode Islander’s skin. Mary then retracted the skin to allow the muscle tissue to be cut. ‘An ample flap, Sister!’ the surgeon warned. An ‘ample flap’ of skin was critical after the operation, for recovering the heads of bones exposed by the saw.
‘Raspatory!’ Shubael Sawyer demanded the bone-scraper, which Louisa was about to hand him. The smashed bone, now exposed, was dissected back with this implement.
Meanwhile, Mary, checking the boy’s pulse found it had sunk too low and in a sure voice asked, ‘Ammonia?’ When the doctor nodded, she applied a quick whiff of liquor of ammonia to revive the patient. Louisa next handed the large rectangular-shaped Capital Saw to the fast-working surgeon.
Ellen turned her head away as the saw bit into the boy’s hip socket and then hacked its way through the bone.
‘Pressure, Mrs Lavelle! Pressure!’ Dr Sawyer rasped at Ellen, and she willed her thumbs and fingers to clamp even tighter around the boy’s thigh.
It was over in no time. With the tenaculum, Dr Sawyer then winkled out the main arteries, the blood dropletting from them. Ellen held on for dear life to stem its flow. Working quickly the doctor next ligated the blood vessels with surgical thread. In advance of the operation Ellen had already wound this silken thread around the tenaculum. Now Dr Sawyer slipped it from over the instrument onto each severed vessel, and tied. Only at his command to ‘release!’ did Ellen slowly uncoil her hands from what was now the remaining stump of the young soldier’s hip.
All eyes focused on the ligations – the full flow of blood now released against them. They held fast, no oozing apparent. Next was required the Gnawing Forceps to grind down the stump of bone to an acceptable smoothness. The flaps of skin, which Mary had previously retracted, she now folded back over what was left of the boy’s hip. Using curved suture needles, Shubael Sawyer knitted together the skin with surgical thread, but loosely, to allow for post-operative drainage of the severed thigh. Louisa then fanned the patient to purge his lungs of the chloroform and administered another whiff of liquor of ammonia, neither of which served to resuscitate him.
‘Brass monkey,’ the doctor ordered. Louisa never raised her eyes, immediately understanding the abbreviated form of the expression the men used to describe weather – ‘So cold it would freeze the balls off a brass monkey!’ She uncorked the chloroform and sprinkled it on the young man’s scrotum. The immediate reaction of cold caused a stir in him but not sufficient to bring him to consciousness. Louisa then administered a further, more generous sprinkling. This time the Rhode Island Red bolted upright.
‘My balls – they’re frozen!’ he shouted in disbelief. Then, remembering those present, groggily apologised, ‘I’m sorry, ladies … Ma’am,’ and made to cover his indecency. His severed limb, now on the floor parallel to the pew on which he sat, seemed to trouble him less greatly than his exposed and frozen manhood.
Later they learned that the Rhode Island Red had succumbed to his injuries.
Became one of the ninety per cent failure rate for such operations. Didn’t make the ten per cent.
By 1862, French physicist, Jean Bernard Foucault had made scientific history by measuring the speed of light using revolving mirrors. Foucault’s compatriot Victor Hugo, with his classic novel Les Miserables, was making a different kind of history. It was left to yet another Frenchman to change forever how Americans would kill Americans.
Captain Claude-Etienne Minié had supplied the world with his own particular brand of French artistry – the minié ball. This was a one-inch-long, leaden slug, the base of which, when fired from the newly-developed rifled musket would expand into the rifle’s grooves and spiral through the air as it was projected. The result was deadly accuracy at two hundred and fifty yards. And at half a mile the minié ball could still kill. The Frenchman’s invention could travel five times further than the bullet of any other weapon.
The first time Ellen saw Hercules O’Brien he had been struck by not just one minié ball but two. ‘Science will kill us all,’ he told her, ignoring his smashed arm and the furrowed groove which ran from front to back along the left side of his blocky skull.
‘What do you mean, Sergeant O’Brien?’ she asked.
‘Well, look how Science has lepped into action in this war.’
She waited till he continued.
‘Exploding mines that go in the ground, so a man, even if he is safe from battle, cannot take a walk to a leafy glade or a cooling brook for fear he step on one and be blown to smithereens.’
Ellen thought how cruel a mind had human science to invent such an inhuman device.
‘… and there isn’t a sharpshooter but has the new telescope lens. There’s no place safe left to hide … and the Gatlings, the repeating guns,’ he explained for her benefit, ‘cut a man in two, they would … leave his legs still walking and his body gone.
‘The generals are fighting with the old tactics while the men are cut to ribbons with the new weapons. General Meagher is still calling for bayonet charges. “Let them taste steel,” he says, but all we get is Rebel lead.’
‘Stop talking,’ she ordered, ‘while I bandage this head of yours!’
Hercules O’Brien paid no heed to her. ‘I’m telling you, missus, before the century is out, Science will be the master of mankind. Science will blow up the world!’
Whatever about ‘Science blowing up the world’, Ellen had already seen the devastating results of the minié ball.
The old round musket ball used early on by the Confederates, would pierce clothing and skin but would bounce off the deeper tissues. The conical minié ball however would bore through all tissue, usually resting near the opposite side of the body to which it had entered. If it did not exit entirely, it left a trail of destruction in its wake.
Now, his head at last bandaged, she gently pushed a probing finger into the sergeant’s other wound. The human finger still more sensitive than what Science could produce. And less likely to damage arteries and nervous tissues.
She kept looking at him, talking, feeling the tension rise within him; wondering how this pint-sized man had earned the name of Hercules?
‘I’m a great big man in a little man’s body,’ he said seriously. ‘Hercules lived in ancient times and he lifted the world on his back … and sure amn’t I carrying the whole Union army on mine!’
She looked at him. His visible eye, from where she had just bandaged him, was dancing with mirth. At last her fingertip found something hard