workin' on the railroad ~ not actually, but you get my drift

[lookingland]

another post about random 19th century american rubbish.

i know, you can scarcely contain yourself, but please try.

first up is a reference picture for corona women's college in corinth, mississipi, which was used as a hospital (by those nuns i was looking for) after the battle of shiloh in 1862. there's not much information about this college online (and only one very grainy, very obscured photograph). it was burned by the yankees in 1864 and took an archeological dig just to ascertain where it actually once stood (the site was apparently contested for years).

i was waffling between the tishomingo hotel and corona college for my hospital site and decided on the latter because it seems to me (haven't done the research yet, but...) that common soldiers would have ended up at the hotel and officers would have been farmed out to private homes or perhaps "better" rooms at the college. they're all being evacuated so it doesn't really matter too much. i just want a visual to work with and there's something appealing about "corona" and the nuns, so we're going with that for now.


corona women's college circa 1862
the other tidbit is also my first book of the 50bookchallenge:

no. 1 ~ Orthopaedic Injuries of the Civil War: An Atlas of Orthopaedic Injuries and Treatments During the Civil War by Julian E. Kuz and Bradley Bengtson. funny to make this my first book of the year after kvetching about it all december. it was almost everything i hoped for: great pictures, great case studies. it's amazing how much punishment the body can take and still recover. wounded soldiers often spent the remainders of their lives with chronic illness and depression. and then some got all shot up to hell and walked away in perfectly good health (albeit on prosthetic legs). short text and not nearly as graphic as i expected, though some good representational pictures overall. very interesting surgical procedure facts (with diagrams). overall, definitely something i want, but not worth spending a bazillion dollars on. if i can ever find a reasonable copy, i will get it.

learned a lot of interesting things from this book. like: knee injuries were some of the worst. surgeons didn't bother amputating at the knee because mortality was about 51%. so they usually chopped off at the thigh, where the odds were about 15-20% better (hip amputations were the most deadly with a scant 25% survial rate). i guess the knee thing surprises me, but also bolsters my excuse/justification for them not taking Lewis's leg off after Gettysburg (why bother? it's the worst kind of break and he's not going to live anyway).

i was also surprised at how technologically advanced the prosthetics industry got (and fast). most people could only afford a wooden leg or so, but there were some pretty fancy mechanical hands going around and a man who'd lost both legs could walk again if he had enough stump to stride. i was tempted, briefly, to go ahead and cut the leg off after all ~ but we'll keep it.

also, i got exactly the thing i was looking for, a picture of a leg brace from that era:



i think i just now realized that i may be a fetishist.

: o p

Comments

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

hahahahaha ~ sometimes i wish i had more to say about a lot of thngs ~ and then i'm glad i don't.

but it's always nice to know someone's out there anyway ~ hello!

: D