What Whiskey Really Did in Civil War Field Hospitals

Every barroom hero between here and Concord will tell you that in the late war they poured a pint of rye down a boy's throat, put a lead ball between his teeth, and took his leg off while he sang “Tenting Tonight.” That is a lie. The men who tell it were never closer to a field hospital than the beer tent at the muster grounds. I have talked with the surgeons who came home to Merrimack County. I have pulled their teeth, so they owe me the truth. The truth is that whiskey did a good deal less on those tables than the barroom gives it credit for.

Chloroform, Ether and the Cone

The army put its men under with chloroform, and some ether, in the great majority of the cuttings. The surgeon folded a cloth into a cone, dripped on the chloroform, and held it over the boy's nose until he quit thrashing and began to snore like a drunk alderman. Chloroform was the field man's favourite. A little bottle went a long way, it worked quick, and it was less likely than ether to go up in flames when some fool steward set his lantern down by the patient's face. Any man who has watched spirit vapour go looking for a flame in his own still-house can picture an ether explosion in a barn full of hay and wounded men. That is a hospital and a cremation for one admission fee.

There were times they cut a man wide awake. After the big fights the supply wagons sat forty miles back in the mud, and the chloroform ran dry before the line of wounded did. A surgeon who served at a church turned hospital after one of the Virginia battles told me the screaming carried half a mile. By the second day, he said, the men waiting in the yard had stopped asking for water and were asking for their mothers.

So where did the whiskey go? The army called it a “stimulant.” It went to boys gone gray and cold with shock. It went down a man's throat after the cutting, when he woke up a quarter of a man lighter. The hospital steward kept it under lock and key with the brandy and the wine, as “hospital stores” or “medical comforts,” and the surgeon had to order every drop. I have it on good authority that the key turned easiest for stewards who were thirsty themselves. The soldiers called that steward the “pill-roller,” and they called the surgeon's whiskey “commissary,” or just “the medicine,” with a wink. If a veteran on the Turnpike tells you he takes his medicine at four o'clock sharp, do not ask him which apothecary.

The Full Bill of the Saw

Here is a piece of natural philosophy for every man at his apparatus. Whiskey does not warm a man. It opens the little blood vessels in the skin, so he feels a lovely glow while the heat drains out of him into the night air. Give it to a man already pale and shaking from loss of blood and you are fanning the fire under his coffin. Whiskey for an amputation is like a church bell for a fire. It makes a fine noise, and the barn burns down all the same.

A ball from a rifle musket does not punch a neat hole like a nail. It flattens and tumbles and shatters the bone like a dropped teacup, and it drives splinters into the meat and the arteries where no man can dig them out. A surgeon looking at a thighbone in forty pieces sees gangrene coming, and so he cuts. The good ones finished in a few minutes. Some made a circular cut straight round and rolled the flesh back like a sleeve. Others cut flaps, leaving a lid of skin to fold over the stump like the crust on a pie nobody wants a slice of. Then came the saw. A surgeon told me bone does not sing the way wood does. It grinds, wet and gritty, like a cobbler rasping a boot heel underwater. They tied off the arteries with silk or horsehair, and when a tie slipped the blood spurted to the ceiling boards. There were barn ceilings in Maryland painted as red as a butcher's apron. The leg went out the window onto a pile taller than a man, with the flies so thick it looked to be moving on its own.

Every soldier learned the arithmetic: the closer the cut to the body, the worse the odds. A man who lost a finger, a hand or a forearm would likely be home splitting wood one-handed by harvest. When the leg came off high at the thigh, about half the men or more never got up again, and a cut at the hip joint was near a death warrant with a surgeon's signature on it. The papers called the surgeons butchers. But a shattered leg left on a man rots, and the rot kills him slow and stinking over two weeks. Any surgeon who had smelled that once would take the saw over it.

Granite State Blood and Washington's Thanks

The 5th New Hampshire Volunteers had some of the heaviest battle losses of any regiment in the Union army. Their colonel was Edward E. Cross of Lancaster, up in Coos County, a red-bearded hellcat who tied a black kerchief on his head when he meant business. He was mortally wounded in the wheat field at Gettysburg in July of '63. A good many boys from this valley came home from the 5th with a sleeve pinned up, or did not come home at all. Buy them a cider on the porches along the Turnpike, and do not ask how it happened.

Two men earned a better reward than they got. In 1862 Dr. Jonathan Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac, set up an ambulance corps and a ranked system of field hospitals. After that the wounded went from the field to a dressing station to a proper hospital instead of lying three days in the corn. Antietam was its first big test, and Letterman saved more limbs with good organization than any saw ever did. In 1863 Surgeon General William Hammond took calomel off the army's supply table, along with tartar emetic. Calomel is a mercury poison, and doctors had poured it into soldiers until their teeth fell out. For his trouble his enemies hauled him before a court-martial and threw him out in 1864, which is how Washington says thank you.

One more curiosity. On September first, 1862, by act of Congress, the Navy ended the sailors' daily grog ration, and a whole fleet went sober at once in the middle of a war. I still cannot tell you whether the Union was saved by the Army's courage or the Navy's sobriety.

The Colonel, the Fishing Line and Uncle Hollis

Junior Vance, a runner of spirits from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, came up to Fort Wilkins. He is so slippery that the revenue men down there quit chasing him and took to betting on him instead. He kept his boots on, because Barnaby has a weakness for feet. His great-great-granddaddy came home after the surrender with one thing worth a nickel, a surgeon's bone saw with a brass back, a wood handle and teeth like a catfish. The family figured some field surgeon had left it in a barn in Virginia. They carved the Christmas ham with it and named it “the Colonel.” It tasted like ham, Junior allows, but nobody ever asked for seconds off the bone.

Junior was running dark down the mountain one night with his lamps out when a deer as big as a church pew jumped in front of him. He went into the ditch and split his head open like a ripe melon. Old Doc Tilley outside Wilkesboro would not let him in the house on account of his wife's rug, so he sewed Junior up in the hay barn by a coal-oil lantern, using the same fishing line he caught bream with. His fee was one quart jar, paid up front. He took a long pull to steady the needle, then another, and splashed the last thimbleful on the wound like holy water. Junior got seven stitches, crooked as a dog's hind leg, and a scar shaped like the letter S. But mark what that country doctor did right: the whiskey went into the doctor and not the patient, and Junior was sewn up wide awake. That is about the most honest use of whiskey in medicine I have heard of.

Junior's Uncle Hollis got bit on the hand by a timber rattler while cutting sourwood. Every old-timer in the holler hollered that liquor would kill the poison, so Hollis drank a pint straight down. His arm swelled up purple and black like a blood sausage, bleeding under the skin. The doctor said the liquor had got his blood moving and made the bleeding and swelling worse. Hollis lived, but for the rest of his life he shook hands like a man holding a teacup. It is the same lesson as the field hospitals. Whiskey is no medicine for shock, bleeding or snakebite. It only makes a dying man cheerful about it.

Then there was Granny Pruitt, an old widow up the Brushies who bought a little from Junior every month for her rheumatism. She measured every delivery in a battered tin cup stamped “U.S. Hosp. Dept.” Her daddy had carried it out of a Union hospital where he served as steward, so it was the very sort of cup the medical comforts were doled out with. She filled it level, and if one drop went over the rim she poured it back in his jar and said, “I pay for the cup, not the slop.” She did that for forty years and would use no other measure. She ran a tighter store than Lincoln's Treasury.

Cutting Like a Surgeon

A surgeon who takes his time kills his patient, and a distiller who hurries his fire kills his customers. First the usual words from the bench: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and what follows is for history and learning only.

My plain corn mash is about eight pounds of cracked corn to five gallons of water. Bring the water near a boil, stir in the corn, and hold it hot for an hour and more, stirring so it does not scorch, until it is as thick as Concord boarding-house porridge. Once it has cooled some, stir in a double handful of malted barley to turn the starch to sugar. Let it cool until you can hold your hand in it comfortably, then pitch your yeast and cover it loosely. Keep it warm and keep the room aired, for a working mash puts out a gas that will smother a man in a closed room. In four or five days the bubbling stops, and you have your wash: a sour beer of a few parts in a hundred spirit.

Strain the wash so the solids do not scorch, and fill the pot no more than three parts full, or it will puke mash into your worm like a drunk at a wedding. Check every joint, because alcohol vapour creeps along the floor like a snake looking for a flame. Keep the fire low and steady, and keep a bucket of water and a sack of sand by the door. A still-house fire burns blue and fast. Inside the pot, the sulphur stinks of the mash, the rotten-egg and boiled-cabbage stuff, rise with the vapour, and bright copper grabs them and holds them. That is the whole reason we use copper. A pot left crusted after a run is like a surgeon who never wipes his saw. Join your seams with silver solder or proper mechanical fittings, and never with lead.

Then come the cuts, which are the surgery of the craft. Throw out the foreshots, all of them. On a five-gallon wash that means the first cupful and more, because it carries methanol, which blinds and kills. The heads are sharp and smell like a varnish shop. They go to the waste bucket or the lamp, never down a throat. The hearts come next, sweet and clean. Collect them in small jars, one after another, so you can see where one cut ends and the next begins. The tails are oily and smell like a wet dog, so set them aside to run again with the next batch. The man who keeps a little of the heads to stretch his jar is like the surgeon who saves a little shattered bone: the rot creeps back, and someone pays. Throw away more than it hurts to.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus “Rabbit” Miller of Wilkesboro asks whether there is any truth in his uncle's story that the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. His uncle has hold of half an old truth, and by the wrong end. Ash is not charcoal. Charcoal is wood burned without much air, black and full of little holes, and finished spirit run slowly through it does come out smoother. Ash is the gray powder left after the fire eats everything, and ash soaked in water makes lye. Our New Hampshire grandfathers burned whole forests for potash and shipped it to the soap makers and glassworks. Lye takes the skin off your hands and the lining off your belly. I have seen a boy who drank lye water by mistake and could take nothing but broth for the rest of his life. Red oak shavings give the spirit a little colour, a little tannin and a little barrel taste, and they take nothing bad out. A bad head is not cured in the keg. It is cured at the jar, by a man with the courage to throw his foreshots and heads in the waste bucket.

Then there is the blue flame. Men put a match to a spoonful, see the pretty blue flame, and announce that the spirit is safe. But methanol burns blue too, so pale you can hardly see it by daylight. The flame tells you something in the spoon will burn. It does not tell you whether it will kill you. Our boys paid for the surgeon's saw with their arms and legs, and whiskey paid for none of it. Respect the men who paid, and respect the craft. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.