A Midnight Amputation

A Midnight Amputation. The Complications of Civil War Surgery. Shortly after 2 A.M. on May 3, 1863, in a hospital tent on the knoll in front of you, 27-year-old surgeon Hunter Holmes McGuire and his team prepared their patient for emergency surgery. The patient's aide, James P. Smith, held a lantern. Assisting surgeons Robert T. Coleman administered chloroform, Harvey Black monitored the pulse, and J. William Walls controlled the bleeding with a tourniquet. McGuire sliced through the skin and muscle to the bone, then sawed through the bone and severed the arm. He left enough skin to close the wound. The amputation was completed within the hour., The patient, Confederate Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall” Jackson, was returning from a nighttime reconnaissance four miles east of here when North Carolina troops fired and wounded him. A bullet had shattered the bone in Jackson's upper left arm, and an artery was damaged when a litter-bearer fell in the darkness and dropped Jackson onto his broken arm. McGuire had let Jackson rest to recover some strength after he arrived here at the hospital, then had examined him and found that the arm was too damaged to save. Jackson appeared to improve after the amputation (three out of four such patients typically survived). He suffered pain in the left part of his chest, which he attributed to the fall from the litter, but it soon vanished, and he was moved to Guinea Station on May 4. There his condition worsened, and he died on May 10. McGuire reported pneumonia as the cause of Jackson's death.