Civil War Issue #1

[Mean MrMustard]

They had National Enquirer back then too????

As odd as it may seem, this is a true story. My brother in high school said his American History teacher told them this story. Several students tried to call him out on that and he proved them wrong. He gave them a history book that documented this.

 

[911paramedic]

his American History teacher told them this story

Well it must be true then.

I suggest you read my earlier post regarding the medical aspects of such a thing.

 

[iamwiz82]

The story:



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One of those wounded had a most interesting story. It was about 3:00 p.m. and the fight was at its hottest. Capers, a surgeon in the Confederate force, noticed that a fine residence stood some 300 yards behind his regiment's battle line and that the woman of the house and her two teenage daughters stood imprudently in their yard, watching the fight, presumably waiting to help with the wounded. Then the battle line started to break and fall back until it was within 150 yards of the house.

"Suddenly I beheld a noble, gallant young friend staggering closer, and then fall to the earth," Capers said. Simultaneously he heard "a piercing scream" from the house behind him. Capers went first to his friend and found that a Yankee bullet had pierced his left foreleg, breaking the tibia. Adding insult to injury, it had somehow glanced upward and carried away his left testicle. Capers was feverishly dressing the boy's wounds (presumably resisting the temptation to make waggish comments about mini&eacute; balls) when a woman came rushing up to him from the house. Her daughter was wounded and he must come.

Finishing with the now-asymmetrical soldier, Capers ran to the house to find a 17-year-old girl in great pain over a bullet hole in her abdomen. "Believing there was little or no hope of her recovery," Capers dressed the wound and rejoined his command. When Gregg abandoned Raymond, Capers stayed behind tending the wounded and remained there for the next two months. He occasionally visited the wounded girl and marveled at what appeared to be her complete recovery.

"About six months after her recovery," he wrote, "the movements of our army brought me again to the village of Raymond." He found the young woman in wonderful health, but with a swollen abdomen: she was seven months pregnant. He kept an eye on the girl, and by his own count, 278 days after her wounding-or exactly nine months-he helped her deliver an eight-pound baby boy. "I was not very much surprised," he recalled, "but imagine the surprise and the mortification of the young lady herself, and her entire family." To the girl's pleas that she had been good, that no man had known her, Dr. Capers paid no heed until three weeks later when the family called him to see the infant, complaining that there was something wrong with the boy's genitals. Examining the baby, Capers fond "an enlarged, swollen, sensitive scrotum, containing on the right side a hard, roughened substance, evidently foreign." He operated at once and soon pulled from the baby a mashed and misshapen mini&eacute; ball. The inference was obvious: this was the same bullet that had injured the young soldier months before, and in plowing through his testicle, it had carried his sperm with it into the girl's abdomen. The result was a messy and painful, but still, in strict terms, virginal conception. "There can be no other solution of the phenomenon," he said, and so he told the family. To give the story a tidy ending, the couple soon married. A better ending would have been an admission that it was a hoax.

A bullet that would strike a soldier below the knee in a stand up battle like Raymond had to be on a pronounced downward trajectory. It is difficult enough to see how hitting a small bone like the tibia would deflect a heavy .58-caliber projectile upwards at an angle of anywhere between 45 and 90 degrees. It is impossible to see how something soft and fleshy, like a testicle, would then deflect the bullet once again, onto a horizontal path that would hit a woman in the abdomen some 150 yards away. Bullets and flesh can do funny things, but not that funny. The only alternative is to assume that for mysterious reasons the unfortunate soldier was performing some sort of ballet move in the middle of the battlefield, putting his left calf roughly at crotch height, allowing the bullet to pass through his leg and his scrotum, and then go on its merry way to hit the girl. To accept either explanation requires assumptions that make the controversial "single bullet theory" in the Kennedy assassination seem like child's play. Moreover, in passing through a combination of numerous layers of fabric and several inches of flesh on the soldier and the woman, the bullet must have been virtually wiped clean of sperm. And for her to have conceived in a uterus full of her own blood, and soon infected with peritonitis, is all but impossible.

Then there is LeGrand Capers himself. If his story was bogus, certainly he was not, or not entirely. Actually there were two men of that name, junior and senior, both Confederate surgeons. LeGrand Capers, Sr., served with the 21st Georgia Infantry, which never spent a day of the war in Mississippi, let alone anywhere near the engagement at Raymond. As for LeGrand Capers, Jr., he was in the Virginia Winchester Artillery. They, too, served the entire war with the Army of Northern Virginia and never set foot in Mississippi. In February 1864, when the miraculous child would have been born, documents place Capers in Virginia. Besides, a regularly enlisted Confederate surgeon would hardly have been allowed to remain at liberty in and around Raymond for weeks after it fell to the Yankees, nor did Gregg's brigade return to the area six months later. They were in east Tennessee by then.

If there is any speck of truth to the story, it may be that some young woman in the vicinity of Raymond was struck in the abdomen during the battle. But she was already pregnant, though not yet aware of it, and somehow the pregnancy survived the wounding, the peritonitis, and proved to be a considerable embarrassment, considering her unmarried and presumably virginal state. The arrival of the child with the bullet in its scrotum allowed her and her parents a far-fetched but face-saving explanation.

As for Capers, he settled in Vicksburg after the war, married locally, and must have heard something of the real story-if there was one-and decided to embellish it a bit. Even he acknowledged its preposterousness. "Doubtless many will pronounce the facts to be presently related as unusual or impossible," he wrote in his account; "to such I need only say, if not, why not?"

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as taken from here

 

[Mean MrMustard]

911paramedic


If I where still in high school I would ask him about his sources. This story and other odd stories he has told many times. Many students try to prove him wrong but they fail. Brother Eugene doesn't bullsh!t.

 

[GasX]

Threads like this one were the reason I lobbied for the new smiley.

 

[Spoooon]

You can find this at snopes.

Claim: During the Civil War, a woman was impregnated by sperm carried on a bullet that passed through the scrotum of a soldier and penetrated her ovaries.
Status: False.

Origins: Sometimes touted as the origin of the phrase "son of a gun," the apocryphal tale of "the bullet through the balls" is a well-traveled legend, often reported by such infamous urban legend vectors as "Dear Abby," as in this example from her 6 November 1982 column:


It seems that during the Civil War (May 12, 1863, to be exact), a young Virginia farm girl was standing on her front porch while a battle was raging nearby. A stray bullet first passed through the scrotum of a young Union cavalryman, then lodged in the reproductive tract of the young woman, who thus became pregnant by a man she had not been within 100 feet of! And nine months later she gave birth to a healthy baby!



The story, in fact, is completely false. The claim for the miraculous "bullet pregnancy" originated with an article that was printed as a joke in the journal The American Medical Weekly on 7 November 1874. Subsequent journals and books cited the article as fact without checking the original source or realizing that it was a put-on, and the story has been passed down through the years as an "actual case that appeared in a real medical journal many years ago."

The long and tortuous history of this legend begins with an article entitled "ATTENTION GYNAECOLOGISTS! -- NOTES FROM THE DIARY OF A FIELD AND HOSPITAL SURGEON, C.S.A." appearing under the name of an "L.G. Capers, M.D., Vicksburg, Miss." in the 7 November 1874 issue of The American Medical Weekly. It recounts the now-familiar story of a Confederate field surgeon who dressed the wound of a soldier injured by a bullet that had entered the soldier's leg, ricocheted off the bone, and carried away his left testicle. Coincidentally, the same surgeon was then called upon a few moments later to administer aid to a young lady who had received a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Exactly 278 days later, the surgeon returned to the village and delivered a baby boy of the wounded women, although she steadfastly maintained that she was still a virgin.

The general tone and style of the article should have indicated to the astute reader that the whole thing was a gag. Even if they didn't, at least a few more obvious clues gave away the joke: The baby was said to have been born "with something wrong about the genitals," and upon examination the surgeon discovered that the ball which had wounded the soldier and impregnated the woman was lodged in the newborn infant's scrotum! Even more implausibly, the soldier, when told of his astonishingly-achieved fatherhood, quickly wed the child's mother! For those who still didn't catch on to the article's facetiousness, a note from the editor explaining that the whole thing was a bit of "fun" (complete with a pun on the putative author's name) was printed in the same journal two weeks later.

(Note: The details of battle given in the original article do correspond to actual events. In May of 1863, Union troops under the command of Major General James B. McPherson set out for Raymond, Mississippi, a town about fifteen miles from Jackson, the state capital. On May 12 a unit led by Major General John A. Logan ran into a Confederate brigade under the command of General John Gregg, and the battle of Raymond ensued, with Gregg eventually withdrawing his outnumbered forces from Raymond and heading down the road to Jackson.)

Several months later, the British medical journal The Lancet reprinted (portions of) the 1874 article. Then, in 1896, George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle cited (and quoted from) The Lancet as a footnote to a section about artificial impregnation in their book Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine. Even Gould and Pyle seem to have recognized the original article's drollery, however, as they mention that it is included "not because it bears any semblance of possibility, but as a curious example from the realms of imagination in medicine." F. Donald Napolitani, M.D., evidently didn't catch the article's whimsicality, though, as he presented all the same details as an "authenticated case report" in his 1959 article about "Two Unusual Cases of Gunshot Wounds of the Uterus" for the New York State Journal of Medicine.

From then on, one or more of these sources has been cited as proof of an actual occurrence "carefully recorded for the annals of medicine" in everything from American Heritage magazine to "Dear Abby," with each source accepting the previous ones' references as accurate citations of a "real" medical journal article.

The links below include the original 1874 article from The American Medical Weekly that started it all, an editor's note from a subsequent issue of the same publication explaining the whole thing as a gag, an oft misinterpreted summation from the 1896 book Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, and a 1959 article from theNew York State Journal of Medicine by a doctor who didn't quite get the joke (or do his homework).

 

[jjones]

and i almost believed it. 😉