Tuesday - October 18, 2011

Unusual News

When the battle happened, the entire Union army wound up closely packed together on a low ridge line above the small southern Pennsylvania town. The Confederate forces, the army of Virginia, had been marauding in territory to the north, while the Union forces, the army of the Potomac, were close to Washington DC. The rebs had turned south and by chance met the yankees coming north just outside the town. As the fighting progressed, the blue forces were pushed back up onto the ridge and nearly surrounded. Sickles “misunderstood” his orders and marched his troops out from the southern part of the line to meet a Confederate advance from the west. Had that advance succeeded, not only would the blue army have been surrounded, but the way would have been open to Washington DC and in all probability the South would have won the war. Sickles’ troops met the onslaught and engaged in some of the most intense fighting of the war, with thousands of casualties on both sides, but he stopped them. During the fight his leg was shot off by a cannonball. The battle continued the next day with the advance now known as Pickett’s charge. The southern forces came within inches of breaking the northern line and taking the hill, but they were repulsed and the battle was lost. This was the turning point of the war, and from that day until the end the south was on the defensive.

Sickles survived. Somehow his leg bone was kept, and for years afterwards he would visit it from time to time.

Over time, the leg became part of a morbid collection of military artifacts, including the bullet that killed President Lincoln, the part of President Garfield’s spine where he was shot, and a huge collection of bones and pickled flesh from other casualties. It became a museum of medicine. Now that collection is being moved again. Since the collection began in the 1860’s it has moved 10 times. Sickles’ leg just won’t stop marching on.

The bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln is mounted under glass, like a diamond in a snow globe, in its new home at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

The lead ball and several skull fragments from the 16th president are in a tall, antique case overlooking a Civil War exhibit in a museum gallery in Silver Spring, just off the Capital Beltway. The military museum, known for its collection of morbid oddities, moved in September from the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

At Walter Reed, visitors had to pass through a security gate and find the museum on the campus, where parking could be a problem. The new building stands outside the gates of Fort Detrick’s Forest Glen Annex.

Visitors can just drive up, walk in and come face-to-face with a perpetually grinning skeleton directing them to an exhibit on the human body. There, one can see a hairball from the stomach of a 12-year-old girl and the amputated leg of a man with elephantiasis — a disease that causes limbs to become bloated. The leg floats upright in a glass jar like an enormous, pickled sausage.

Deputy Director Tim Clarke Jr. said the museum will close in January and reopen by May 21 with its largest-ever display of objects to mark its 150th anniversary. The scope of the exhibits is still being decided, he said.

“We are sure, though, that we are programming and planning an exhibit that will astound our visitors,” Clarke said.

The $12 million relocation established a permanent home for an institution that has had 10 addresses since 1862. That’s when Surgeon General William Hammond directed medical officers in the field to collect “specimens of morbid anatomy” for study at the newly founded museum along with projectiles and foreign bodies. A photograph nearly covering one wall of the museum’s new Civil War exhibit shows amputated legs stacked like firewood.

The exhibit also includes the shattered bones of U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles’ lower right leg, mounted for display beside a 12-pound cannonball like the one that hit him during the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. Most of the museum’s objects, including 2,000 microscopes and hundreds of thousands of human brain specimens, are in an off-site warehouse.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/18/2011 at 08:05 AM   
Filed Under: • Military • News-Briefs •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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