I asked if he thought the story could possibly be true. “The girl’s mother believed it, and nothing else matters,” he replied. “I guess you could say that baby was the original son-of-a-gun.” Part of the story was indeed factual. Dr. Le Grand Capers was the real name of a Confederate surgeon who wrote about the minié ball pregnancy in the American Medical Weekly in 1874, under the headline: “Attention Gynaecologists! Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon CSA.” However, Capers intended the article as a spoof of the wildly inflated stories of medical prowess reported by other
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