![]() One morning, a surgeon making his early rounds looked sharply at Perkins’ leg and then went to fetch the other doctors. The pain of the wound and the swelling in his leg kept him awake most of the time. Aloysius “seemed very long and some of the nights longer” Aloysius General Hospital, a set of wooden barracks attached to a Catholic church. By the time he had been placed aboard railroad cars and then a steamer for Washington, his leg was “swollen as large as the skin wouldĪ Civil War field surgeon about to amputate a leg. I suffered with that shattered leg,” Perkins wrote in his memoir. The surgeons sighed and acceded to Perkins’ wishes, loading him on an ambulance that bumped and rocked its way northward over Virginia’s frightful roads for two days. Mid-19th-century gender conventions invested a greatĭeal of meaning in the whole white male body the loss of an arm or leg, they well knew, would result in the loss of masculinity, and of status and power. ![]() His resistance was not unusual many Union and Confederate soldiers recoiled at the thought of amputation. Prepared to amputate his leg, but Perkins objected. Luckily, Perkins’ friends soon found him, cinched a rope around his leg above the wound to form a tourniquet and carried him on a blanket for three miles to the nearest field hospital. Dizzy but still conscious, he watched the Chancellor house and the nearby woods catch fire and burn, killing many of his comrades who had been similarly wounded in the fight, but could not flee the Perkins managed to reach the road and began to crawl across it, but could Moments before, during some of theįiercest fighting at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, Perkins had been unhitching one of his horses from a Fifth Maine artillery caisson when a rebel shell struck him in the right leg just above the knee.Īt first he did not realize how badly he had been wounded but when he tried to walk to the rear, his leg buckled and nearly severed in two. Napoleon Perkins dragged himself toward the plank road behind the Chancellor house, shot and shells plowing up the ground all around him and apple blossoms drifting into his hair. Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
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