The piles of amputated arms, feet, hands, and legs that vividly feature in so many descriptions of Civil War field hospitals were a gauge both of medical knowledge during what has been termed “the very end of the medical Middle Ages” and of military technology at the very beginnings of its era of modern lethality. The Minié ball was capable of rendering horrific damage to the human body. Its hollow conical shape, soft lead composition, and relatively slow speed guaranteed it would flatten, spread, and deform when striking flesh and bone, sometimes breaking into multiple fragments that could
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