Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Secrets of the Civil War: Battlefield Angels and Amputations

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

Approximately 620 thousand soldiers died in the Civil War, and some historians believe that number might be closer to 750 thousand. But believe it or not, it could have been worse. The Civil War hastened medical advancements out of necessity, and we’re still benefiting from many of these advancements today.  Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reid Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to Episode 10 of Secrets of the Civil War. In early April of 1862, Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant led 63,000 Union troops to southwest Tennessee where they fought 40,000 Confederate soldiers at the Battle of Shiloh. When the fighting ended, nearly 20,000 men lay dead or wounded strewn about the Tennessee landscape. Battlefield medics couldn't keep up, and thousands of injured men were forced to wait out the night, laying in the rainy, muddy fields. As the legend is told, when the sun set and the temperatures dipped to near freezing, their wombs begin to glow a bluish green. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Listen, I'm going to give you a little content warning right at the top. If you have a squeamish stomach, be forewarned because we are going to be talking about things like Civil War medicine, and the wounds are not always pleasant to think about, but I do think you will find this episode fascinating because Civil War medicine has actually had a significant impact on medicine in the United States today. Okay, if you're with me, onward. It took two days for the battlefield doctors and nurses to attend to all of the wounded men at Shiloh. Some didn't make it, but some, those soldiers who reported that their wounds had glowed an eerie blue, were said to have made unexpected, quick recoveries. For almost 140 years, no one could explain why. In 2001, two high school boys, Bill Martin and John Curtis,

visited the Shiloh Civil War battlefield and heard the famous legend of Angels Glow. Bill was a Civil War buff and wanted to try to explain the phenomenon for their science fair project. Bill's mother Phyllis was a microbiologist for the USDA Agricultural Research Service. She studied bioluminescent bacteria in soils. It was an aha moment when her son told her about the Angel Glow story. She zeroed in on a specific bacteria called Photohaptus luminescens that emitted a blue glow. At the time, Phyllis recalled that the boys had wondered if bacteria had anything to do with the mystery of soldiers' glowing wounds at the Battle of Shiloh, but it's not something that any scientists were clamoring to find out. So Bill and John began to piece together the factors that could have created the blue glow on that April night in 1862. It turned out that photohabdus luminescence was

most likely present in the Civil War fields of Shiloh. What's more, they learned that this particular bioluminescent strain is known to produce antibiotics that can inhibit the growth of other bacteria. This meant that instead of festering overnight, the Angel's Glow bacteria could have possibly slowed the spread of infection in their open wounds. The cold and wet conditions of Shiloh in April 1862 would have lowered the injured soldiers' temperature to nearly the exact degree needed for their bodies to be hospitable to the bioluminescent bacteria, which then entered the wounds through the muddy soil that the men laid in. The bacteria then survived by eating the pathogens in the wounds. That previously unexplained battlefield glow was the sign of healing.

Isn't that crazy? That is just like, for me, that was definitely like a didn't know that kind of moment. Somewhere between 600,000 and 750,000 men died in the Civil War. But believe it or not, it could have been worse. The Civil War hastened medical advancements out of necessity, and we are still benefiting from many of those advancements today. Unconventional practices and people have always been at the forefront of important moments in history, and there was no one more unconventional for her time than Dr. Mary Edwards Walker. A doctor, a women's rights advocate, an abolitionist, and a rational dress trailblazer, Dr. Walker became the first female U.S. Army surgeon during the Civil War. became the first female U.S. Army surgeon during the Civil War. Born in New York in 1832, she was raised to question everything. Education was incredibly important to the Walker family. Mary's

parents were free thinkers, and they opened the first free school in Oswego, New York, so their six daughters would have the same primary education as their son. From there, Mary graduated from a secondary school, and because occupations were still so limited for women at the time, she became a teacher. But teaching wasn't her passion. Medicine was. She used her teaching salary to enroll in medical school, and in 1855, Mary Walker became the second woman in the United States to graduate with a medical degree, which she received from Syracuse Medical College. The first was Elizabeth Blackwell, who graduated from the same school just six years before Mary. When Mary Walker got married after graduation, she held firm to her unconventional ways. She refused to take her husband's last name. She omitted the obey part in her marriage vows,

and she wore a Victorian reform dress, which was a type of dress that had a knee-length hemline and was paired with trousers underneath. So scandalous, trousers. The National Dress Reform Association was established in 1856, and their main goal was to get rid of the corset and reduce the weight of a woman's undergarment to seven pounds. It makes me laugh to think that they wanted to reduce it to seven pounds, which meant that before 1856, women's undergarments weighed even more than that. So I don't think we need to get into a whole discussion about like, how much does your underwear weigh? But I'm guessing it's less than seven pounds. And it's no wonder that some women, especially like Dr. Walker, wore alternative clothing. Wearing seven pounds of underwear was not helpful when she was trying to do her job.

mocked. She was rejected from colleges and from various medical practices because she refused to wear the traditional, like, nearly floor-length dress. Mary and her new husband Albert started a medical practice together in Rome, New York, but the practice failed because the community refused to put their medical trust in a female doctor. But once the Civil War began, the country could no longer snub a qualified surgeon like Mary. There were only about 100 military doctors in the Union who were qualified to treat battlefield injuries, and the supply of surgical kits available to be sent out to field hospitals hovered around 200. President Lincoln knew he would need to commission a massive revolution in medical care, supplies, and availability. In doing so, the Civil War era set the stage for modern medicine.

Physicians who'd learned mostly through lectures now had a massive training ground. And don't get me wrong, the Union military really tried hard to keep Mary from practicing, but eventually they contracted her as the first woman civilian surgeon to the U.S. Army. Imagine a morning as a soldier in an encampment with your regiment. You wake up in a tent surrounded by men like you who slept in their unwashed clothes they'd been wearing for minimum of a week, probably two, maybe longer. You go outside to use the bathroom, which is, you know, wherever you feel like you want to go. And then maybe after that you find yourself a cup of coffee and some hardtack for breakfast.

Oh, does it sound like I missed a step? Is anyone else cringing about the absence of hand washing? I mean, washing hands out in a field would have been logistically tricky, which, you know, if you've ever been camping, you would know that unless you had like a bathroom with water nearby. But even as a nation, we just didn't yet understand how important it was to wash our hands and how much a bit of soap and water could cut down on the spread of germs and disease. But it gets worse. It wasn't only the soldiers who weren't washing their hands. Doctors and nurses typically wiped their dirty, even bloody hands, on their already dirty aprons. Or, and I'm going to apologize to my germaphobe friends right now, they dipped their hands into communal buckets of water before picking up the same unwashed tools they used on multiple patients.

I mean, that is, in the words of my teenagers, big yikes. It's big yikes. Which means that this will not come as a surprise to you. During the Civil War, twice as many soldiers died of disease than from combat injuries. Communicable diseases like mumps, chickenpox, measles, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and malaria killed three out of five Northern soldiers who died and two out of three Confederate soldiers. That is incredible. The majority of Civil War soldiers came from rural areas where they had less exposure to contagious illness, and it meant that many of them lacked immunity to them. Men who were once protected from contagions because of their location isolation were suddenly marching shoulder to shoulder and sleeping side by side in unventilated tents with other people. And even though the smallpox vaccine, which had been available for decades, was required

for both the Union and Confederate troops, it was often disregarded in the rush to get more men out to the battlefields. Quarantine started to gain ground as an effective virus suppressant. And guess who was a big fan of quarantine? Dr. Mary Walker, you guessed correctly. Patients found with smallpox symptoms were immediately sent to a separate, what they called an eruptive fever hospital. It was a very effective way to contain the virus and keep it from spreading through the troops. It was a very effective way to contain the virus and keep it from spreading through the troops.

Through trial and error, soldiers eventually began to protect themselves from some of the more preventable sources of illness and infection. Around 1862, both armies began to dig latrines rather than rely on local waterways. Burying human and animal waste cut down on exposure to disease considerably. Like Dr. Mary Walker, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell got involved in the war effort. In 1861, she created the Women's Central Relief Association, or WCAR, in order to organize supply and charity networks and register more women to become nurses in military hospitals. But her work with the WCAR was sidelined because another private agency, the United States Sanitary Commission, we've talked about this before, headed by an all-male team, was given the task of overseeing the efforts to support wounded or sick soldiers.

The Sanitary Commission passed on naming Elizabeth their superintendent of women nurses. Instead, they went with another woman, Dorothea Dix. Dorothea and Elizabeth had similar views about women's competence in the medical field, but they differed on one key point. Elizabeth Blackwell thought women should be paid professionals, Elizabeth Blackwell thought women should be paid professionals, and Dorothea Dix felt they should be volunteers. Unsurprisingly, the Sanitary Commission went with Dorothea Dix. Before the Civil War, hospitals served a much different purpose than they do today. say via a farming accident, they generally stayed at home with the thought that the comforts of their beds and families would aid in their healing. If a female relative who was going to try to nurse them back to health wasn't enough to help them recover, a doctor made a house call.

Hospitals served as more of a charity service, especially for those who had no one to help care for them in their homes. Once the war started and soldiers were wounded beyond the capacity of medical tents, it was clear that hospitals would need to be used for more than basic civilian health care. Up until then, the largest hospitals in the United States had an average of 40 beds. Within the first year of the conflict, large-scale general hospitals with up to 300 beds in each were established in large cities. And by the end of the war, there were hundreds of new hospitals with a national total of around 400,000 beds. In the North, the conditions in hospitals quickly became superior to those in the South, due in part to the organizational skills of women like Dorothea Dix and her team of volunteer nurses, Dr. Mary Walker, who organized the Women's Relief Organization that helped families of the wounded visit their loved ones in the hospital,

of the wounded visit their loved ones in the hospital, and Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross who delivered supplies and visited soldiers in hospitals. In the South, women contributed to the war effort in every way they could. Some volunteered in hospitals and some started saving their urine. You heard that right. Women began collecting urine, or as they so delicately put it, chamber lye, L-Y-E, lye. Early out of the war, a few Confederate hospitals considered using urine to treat wounds, and they asked people on the home front to save theirs and send it to Confederate officials so that it could be used for medicinal purposes. It didn't really catch on in a very widespread way. I wonder why. I'm going to give that some thought. As the war escalated and supplies became hindered by northern blockades,

a southern chemist named Jonathan Harrelson found a way to extract potassium nitrate from urine and use it to make a fast-depleting resource that the armies needed. Gunpowder. He took out an ad in Selma, Alabama and asked Southern women to save their urine for this purpose. Willing women poured their chamber lye into a truck pulled by a horse around town and barrels of it off to Harrelson's plant where the liquid was converted to the needed potassium nitrate for gunpowder. And that, my friends, is some real dedication to the cause. That's a real dedication. I don't know that I'd have that in me. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey.

We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio!

Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Soldiers were transported to the newly built general hospitals by wagon, train, or ship.

But getting them stabilized to even travel to the hospitals involved another key infrastructure creation, an ambulance system. There was no military ambulance corps at the beginning of the Civil War. Ambulances that did exist were two-wheeled carts driven by civilians who mostly fled away from battlefields rather than towards them. They were also under the control of the quartermaster, the military officer in charge of rations, which meant that these wagon ambulances were often commandeered to deliver supplies and ammunition instead of wounded soldiers. Enter Dr. Jonathan Letterman, who joined the Army in 1849 as an assistant surgeon. Letterman's work has since given him the title of Father of Modern Battlefield Medicine. His work and innovations probably saved thousands of

soldiers from dying horrific and painful deaths. In 1861, he was assigned to the Army of the Potomac, but in a few short months, he was made medical director of the entire army and received the rank of major. As I mentioned at the top of the episode with the Battle of Shiloh, sometimes removing wounded men from battlefields and getting them a space to be seen in makeshift field hospitals was a days-long process. Battlefield wounds were gruesome things that would fester as soldiers lay waiting. fester as soldiers lay waiting. Wounded men who were not carried to shelter by a fellow soldier often suffered from exposure, hunger and thirst, the pain and gravity of their injuries, and even the threat of insects and wild animals. If an injury didn't kill a man, then waiting often did. The first thing Dr. Letterman did when he became the Union Army's medical director was establish and organize an ambulance corps. He trained men to act as official

stretcher bearers, and the new stretchers were made with sturdy burlap sheets in plentiful quantities so that transporting the wounded became an easier process. He put the kibosh on using ambulance wagons for carrying anything other than injured soldiers and gave orders that only ambulance corps men were allowed to remove the wounded from battlefields. Caravans of 50 ambulances, each with a driver and two stretcher bearers, had the sole job of ferrying the injured from the fields to the medical tents. What's more is that he completely revolutionized the ambulance wagon itself. The two-wheel open carts were replaced with four-wheeled canvas-covered structures. They were bigger, too, and had spring suspensions to make rides more comfortable for patients.

Under the driver's seat, he added a lockbox meant for morphine. Dr. Letterman also established a new type of medical post called field dressing stations, where the men could immediately access the treatment they needed. It was in these stations that he instituted the concept of triage, or sorting the wounded into categories of care. In other words, they developed a system of identifying which wounded soldiers needed immediate intervention from medical staff at the stations, who could wait a short time, and who could wait even a bit longer. I mean, we are all now very familiar with the concept of triage. It's commonplace in every hospital emergency room. Once the wounded were stabilized at the field dressing station, the ambulance corps transported them on to a field hospital.

station, the ambulance corps transported them on to a field hospital. These were usually located in nearby homes or barns and had makeshift operating theaters where emergency surgeries or further treatments could be performed. If further treatment or long-term healing was needed, the patients would be transferred to the large general hospitals that were being established in nearby cities. Just like our inpatient systems now, the sick and injured would remain at the hospital until they were well enough to return home. One of the field hospitals that Jonathan Letterman set up in 1862 was Lacey House in Falmouth, Virginia. Clara Barton and Dr. Mary Walker likely crossed paths many times during the war, both called into service to administer medical aid. But after the bloody Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, which was like 10 miles from Lacey House, we know that they both

worked there together, helping the hundreds of patients that were brought in. There were so many wounded Union soldiers that they were stashed under tables and on the shelves of china cupboards that had been pushed together. Clara Barton quickly moved outside where she set up a soup kitchen, offered heated bricks and blankets to cold soldiers, and gave comfort where she could. She was overwhelmed with work and said of the dead and wounded around her, I wrung the blood from the bottom of my clothing before I could step for the weight of it about my feet. Mary Walker remained inside the house, finally in an environment where no one questioned her right to be there, if only because there were too many wounded men who needed help.

No one had time to second guess her. It was at Lacey House that Mary first put on a green surgeon's sash so people could identify at a glance that she had surgical skills. She later wrote, I had not then any government authority to put the sash on, but after years of professional rejection and questioning, she was done asking for permission. A few days after the Battle of Fredericksburg, the already famous poet Walt Whitman arrived at the Lacey House looking for his brother George. George was there, patched up after suffering a mild injury, and Walt Whitman stayed on for two life-changing weeks. He wrote of his time at Lacey House. Some of the men were dying.

I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folks home and mothers. I talked to three or four who seemed most susceptible and needing it. The scene's pretty easy to imagine, a large home packed with the injured, sick, dead, and dying. Walt Whitman sitting at soldiers' bedsides helping them write letters home and perhaps watching as an exhausted Clara Barton wrung the blood from the bottom of her skirts or nodding to Dr. Mary Walker as she tended to the injured in her men's trousers and a surgeon's green sash. There are close to 100 soldiers buried right on the grounds of the Lacey House. Clara Barton and Mary Walker moved on to new battlefields where their skills and supplies were needed, and Walt Whitman, so inspired by what he saw at Lacey House, traveled to Washington, D.C. where he spent the rest of the war reading to hospital patients,

The rest of the war reading to hospital patients, writing letters for them, bringing them food and clothing, and even occasionally helping tend to their wounds. Dr. Jonathan Letterman passed away in 1872 and was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery. His gravestone bears the gravity of what he did for medicine and our world. It reads, The man who brought order and efficiency into the medical service and who was the originator of modern methods of medical organization. Early on in the war, a contributing factor to combat-related deaths was inexperienced surgeons. Many of them had spent more time in a lecture hall than they did practicing their skills in real life. Their techniques were outdated.

In previous wars and skirmishes, surgeons often tried to save limbs by using wound-cleaning rats and maggots. I know, we are all cringing really hard right now, but there was some merit to the idea that pests fend off dead or dying tissue, which actually helps hasten the healing process. But no, it was not a sustainable solution. I'm very glad they don't use rats anymore. Okay. I know they still use leeches in like some surgical situations, but I'm real glad about the rats. One of the reasons using rats and maggots was not sustainable is because often volunteer nurses refused to go near men who had maggots in their wounds, which I can understand. I get that. As war surgeons gained real life

experience, they discovered that the best way to stop deadly infections was simply to lop off that body part as quickly as possible. Soldiers had the highest chance of survival if the limb was removed within 48 hours of injury, and battlefield surgeons eventually perfected the skill. It took them no more than six minutes to get a moaning man on the table, apply a cloth soaked in chloroform or ether, and make the cut. Union surgeons soon became the most skilled limb hackers in history. And amputation saved more lives than any other wartime medical procedure by instantly turning complex injuries into simple ones. Over the course of the Civil War, three out of four surgeries or around 60,000 operations were amputations. 60,000 operations were amputations. That is like 41 amputations for every single day of the war.

To put this in even more perspective, the year after the war ended, the state of Mississippi spent 20% of its annual budget providing artificial limbs for war veterans. 20%. And that's not 20% of like, oh, 20% of our hospital budget. No, no, no. 20% of the state budget. Army surgeons gained a reputation with soldiers for being butchers. But although amputations left soldiers without limbs, it was still widely considered one of the quickest, most effective ways for surgeons to treat as many patients as possible in a short amount of time. Dr. Mary Walker didn't completely agree. She said she spoke to many soldiers who told her they would rather die than live without a limb. or die, then live without a limb. Mary wrote that these cases made it very difficult for me to suppress my emotions, and she began to consider what she could do. Dr. Walker did not want to publicly voice her reservations about amputation for fear that she would be blacklisted from

military hospitals. She was concerned, though, that soldiers' injuries were sometimes not severe enough to warrant amputation, and she suspected that some of the doctors just wanted more practice at the procedure or to quickly move on to the next patient. Dr. Walker also believed that with proper sanitation and attention, some of the wounds could be managed just fine without amputation. So she spoke with wounded soldiers when she could, seeking out the patients who'd been recommended for amputation and asking to consult with them. She armed them with information about the alternatives and reminded them that technically surgeons weren't allowed to remove a limb if the patient didn't agree to the procedure. There were no consent forms back then. So like no medical paper trails where you can be like, listen, John, you agree to have your arm removed. But Mary Walker told as many men as she could that they had the right to speak up about the decisions concerning their medical care.

Maybe it felt futile to her at the time, or like a small act. But later in Dr. Walker's life, when she had moved back to her quiet New York home, neighbors noted that many soldiers came to visit her and often thanked her for helping them keep their limbs. Dr. Walker wasn't the only medical professional concerned about the huge number of amputations taking place, but the fact was that in battlefield hospitals, it really often did seem like the best and most practical choice. But amputation did come with its own set of logistics. Medical personnel had to figure out what to do with, to put it bluntly, large piles of discarded limbs. Confederate soldier John Opie wrote a letter home describing the site. He said, there were piles of legs, feet, hands, and arms all thrown together and at a distance resembled piles of corn at a corn

shucking. Many of the feet still retained a boot or a shoe. With few options for disposing of these amputated limbs, most were buried in mass graves. But there are a number of tales about special care being taken. When Major General Stonewall Jackson was wounded in Chancellorsville, Virginia, his arm was amputated at a field hospital in an effort to save his life. After surgery, his arm was placed on a pile of amputated limbs nearby, but a chaplain rescued it from the pile, thinking that Jackson may want it. And it turns out, he did. But Stonewall Jackson died of pneumonia only eight days later, and his arm was buried separately at the family cemetery in a marked location. While many mass graves of amputated limbs have been discovered, his is the only

amputated limb with an individual marked burial site. But no matter what became of life and limbs, what remains are the techniques perfected by those wartime surgeons who spent years performing amputations. They knew to cut as far from the heart as possible and to never slice through joints, standards that modern surgeons still practice. And when soldiers didn't survive the war or the operating table, they had options, even in death. Wanting to grow their fledgling industry, embalmers went to where death was happening. And in the 1860s, that place was the war front. Embalming, or treating the deceased body with chemicals to slow down the decaying process, was not widely used in the United States before the war.

Embalmers set up stations close to military camps and approached soldiers going into battle to offer their services should they be killed. It was morbid, maybe, but there were plenty of embalmers who hovered like vultures, ready to land on soldiers. But it was also a completely practical conversation to be having. Soldiers quickly realized that embalming would be a way to bring closure to their family if they died. Before it became popular, soldiers' corpses were rarely given any kind of burial. They were mostly left to decompose wherever they had fallen or they were rolled into mass graves. Embalming allowed a soldier's loved one to slow down the process of funerals and burials. Typically, once death occurred, a family would have maybe 48 hours with the body. once death occurred, a family would have maybe 48 hours with the body. Corpses would be washed, dressed in special clothing, and laid out for a short viewing and funeral, and then they lit candles to mask the stench of decay. But if a soldier died and was embalmed,

his body had more time to travel home where his family could see it before the burial. where his family could see it before the burial. When President Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie died in 1862, Lincoln asked for him to be embalmed so they could have more time with him. It helped popularize the process, and many soldiers spent wages on embalming contracts. It cost them about $100. Around 40,000 soldiers were embalmed during the war. And after his assassination, Lincoln himself was embalmed, and his body was put on display for mourners four weeks before it was finally buried. We have a previous episode on this called Deaths in the White House. One of the biggest misconceptions about Civil War medicine is

that amputations and surgeries were performed without any anesthesia. We can thank the drama of Hollywood for this, but while anesthesia was still a relatively new medical technology, it was already widely used before the Civil War. Dr. William T.G. Morton made history on October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital's Surgical Amphitheater, now known as the Etherdome, when he performed the first public surgery using ether as an anesthetic. It took longer, though, for doctors to understand dosage. Giving a patient too much anesthesia was common, but doctors also pretty frequently underdosed patients out of fear of overdosing. And this led to some partially awake surgical patients. So Civil War surgeries were being performed

with anesthetic, but it was not always enough. In 1862, there were only six colleges of pharmacy in the United States, so most doctors prescribed, compounded, and dispensed their own anesthetic medications. The Surgeon General recognized that it needed regulation, and the federal government began to manage supplies of available anesthesia medicines, both to prevent overdosing and to ensure an ample supply remained for the next battle. On the other hand, the Confederate Army had a tough time securing enough anesthesia because of the Northern Blockade. The standard method of soaking a handkerchief with chloroform wasted a lot of liquid that they were desperate to save. Confederate doctor Julian Chisholm solved the dilemma by inventing a two

and a half inch inhaler. Chloroform was dripped through a perforated circle on the side onto a sponge in the interior, and as the patient inhaled through tubes, the vapors mixed with air. This new method required only one-eighth of an ounce of chloroform compared to the old two-ounce dose. Rebels treated nearly as many patients as the union did using a fraction of the supplies. many patients as the Union did, using a fraction of the supplies. This inhaler was the standard form of anesthetic administration for over 100 years, until needles began to be more commonly used. But the inhaler is still used by the military and as a backup in surgery when an IV dose isn't available. In April of 1864, after Dr. Mary Walker had finished helping a Confederate doctor with a surgery, she was captured by Confederate troops and accused of being a spy.

In fact, she was not a spy. Even though a year earlier, she had written to the War Department asking to be employed as one, they turned her down. She was held as a prisoner of war at the notorious Castle Thunder Prison near Richmond, Virginia, before she was freed in a prisoner exchange and returned to the Union six months before the end of the war. Because of her sacrifice and her service, President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln, presented Mary with the Medal of Honor in November of 1865. Illustrious, yes, but it was a compromise. What Mary really wanted was to be commissioned retroactively. She spent the entire war working in the service of the Union military

as a surgeon, but she was never commissioned as an officer. Mary spent the remainder of her life advocating for women's rights. And in her later years, she opened her home to those who were also ostracized, harassed, and arrested for not conforming to traditional ideas of how people should dress. She herself continued to wear what was considered to be men's clothing, trousers, a suit coat, and a top hat. When she was criticized, she was nonplussed. I don't wear men's clothes, she said. I wear my own clothes. she said. I wear my own clothes. Like, they're not men's clothes. They belong to me. When she died at the age of 86, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was buried in a black jacket and trousers.

Join me next time as we talk about what photography, left and right shoes, and can openers have to do with the Civil War. I'll see you then. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. This episode is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reed. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to hit the follow or subscribe button on the podcast platform of your choice. We also benefit so much from ratings, reviews, and sharing on social media. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you again soon.