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| Fort Richardson Hospital |
We were able to all go to 'The Battle of Fort Richardson' on Saturday at the state park in Jacksboro (Fort Richardson State Park). Reenactors from Key's Battery and the 13th Texas Cavalry (Cleburne's Division) put on reeacted battles on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The boys especially enjoyed seeing the guys shooting from horseback and the four cannons going off periodically throughout the battle. The cannons occasionally produced some neat smoke rings that hung in the air for a few minutes. After the 'battle', we followed the soldiers (both infantry and cavalry) back to their tents set up on the green near the fort buildings.
We wandered over to the fort hospital and listened to the 'surgeon' talk about Civial War era medicine - especially how it affected doctors treating soldiers. Evidently, doctors trained for two years (listening to lectures the first year, then listening to the same lectures the second year). Then they were turned loose to practice. He said often a doctor (surgeon) had one hand on the instrument and another on the training manual! The doctors at the time had little experience dealing with gunshot wounds (few murders and fewer drive by shootings than we have today :) and the war brought a great concentration of these bullet wounds. Also, the soft lead bullets that they used caused major damage on bodies and limbs - not the neat cauterized wounds you see in the movies caused by today's bullets. So he explained why all those amputaions occured - if you got shot in the arm or leg, chances were you would lose part (or most) of it.
The surgeon giving the talk studies a lot of first hand accounts of medicine, battles, etc to try to get a good idea of how things really happened in history (his focus was on the Civil War). It was neat to learn about how many first hand accounts exist. Evidently the internet is turning out to be a great way to find this information. You can easily download journals, manuals, articles, etc that were never published (or only locally) and have probably been kept in museums or private collections all over the country. What a great alternative to boring textbooks for learning history!
Another thing we noticed while we there, were how cool the buildings seemed. The day was in the middle nineties and the sun was shining, yet the interiors - with their high ceilings, wood floors, and wrap around porches - felt pleasant. We did hear several people complaining about the heat and there was some vigorous fan waving, but we were comfortable. I feel sorry for all those people who have become dependent on 72 degree air conditioning - I would hate being restricted to the indoors during the entire Texas summer!
