What the Surgeon's Saw Really Cost
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells what whiskey actually did in the Civil War field hospitals: surgeons mostly used chloroform and ether to put a man under, and whiskey was mostly given as a 'stimulant' afterward. He covers the end of the Navy grog ration, Surgeon General Hammond's court-martial, and the 5th New Hampshire's heavy losses. Brushy Mountain runner Junior Vance comes on to tell new stories about a family bone saw, a Wilkesboro doctor who stitched his scalp for a jar, and an uncle who tried to cure a rattlesnake bite with liquor, and Wilkins finishes the hour by answering Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg and taking apart the blue-flame myth.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Put that chain down, you great hairy sack of bad decisions. That is the doctor's leg you are gnawing on, and I mean a carved hickory leg off a peg-legged peddler who never paid me, and you will choke on a splinter and I will have to operate. Settle down. Settle. There. He has gone back to licking himself in a place no Christian ought to see before supper.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends and neighbors, sinners and selectmen, and whatever county deputy is crouched under my window tonight smelling of wet wool and cowardice. You are listening to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, the old Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your dentist, your blacksmith, and on some Tuesdays your bad influence. Tonight's subject has blood on it: What the Surgeon's Saw Really Cost. We will talk about whiskey in the field hospitals of this late war, what it did, and the many things it did not do. Before we start sawing, a quick word from the gentleman who keeps my lamp oil paid for.
♦ Wax crackle swells briefly
Announcer: A quick word, friends! The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is hammered from heavy-gauge pure copper by hands that know the trade. See one at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, or order yours today at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Sawbones and the Bottle.
♦ Jar drip, crackle
Wilkins: Now. Every barroom hero between here and Concord will tell you that in the war they poured a pint of rye down a boy's throat, put a lead ball between his teeth, and took his leg off while he sang 'Tenting Tonight.' Friends, that is a lie told by men who were never closer to a field hospital than the beer tent at the muster grounds. I have talked with the surgeons who came home to Merrimack County. I have pulled their teeth, so they owe me the truth. Here is what they told me.
Wilkins: The army used chloroform, and some ether, and it used them in the great majority of the cuttings. A surgeon would fold a cloth into a cone, drip on the chloroform, and hold it over the boy's nose until he quit thrashing and started snoring like a drunk alderman. Chloroform was the field man's favorite. A little bottle went a long way, it worked quick, and it was less likely than ether to go up in flames when some fool steward set his lantern down next to the patient's face. Picture an ether explosion in a barn full of hay and wounded men. That is a hospital and a cremation for one admission fee.
Wilkins: There were times they cut a man wide awake. After the big fights the supply wagons were stuck forty miles back in the mud, and the chloroform ran dry before the line of wounded did. Those were the days you heard it. A surgeon who was at a church-turned-hospital after one of the Virginia battles told me the screaming carried half a mile. He said by the second day the men waiting in the yard had stopped asking for water and were asking for their mothers, and that is a sound that stays in a man's ears long after the war is over.
Wilkins: So where did the whiskey go? The whiskey was what the army called a 'stimulant.' It went to boys gone gray and cold with shock. It went down a man's throat after the cutting, when he woke up a quarter of a man lighter. The hospital steward kept it under lock and key, along with the brandy and the wine, as 'hospital stores' or 'medical comforts,' and the surgeon had to order every drop. I have it on good authority that the key turned easiest for stewards who were thirsty themselves. The army gave the whiskey to men lying in a field of their own blood and called it a comfort, which is about the strangest use of that word I have ever heard.
Wilkins: Now here is the part the barroom heroes never learned, and I want every listener to take it home. Whiskey does not warm a man. It opens the little blood vessels in the skin, so he feels a lovely glow while the heat drains right out of him into the night air. Give whiskey to a man already pale and shaking from blood loss and you are fanning the fire under his coffin. Whiskey for an amputation is like a church bell for a fire: it makes a fine noise and the barn burns down all the same. A man full of whiskey feels warm the way a man in a burning house feels warm: briefly, and with poor prospects.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain drags
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I know you have opinions on limbs. Barnaby has four perfectly good limbs and treats every one of them like a surgeon's spare. He stood on his own foreleg last week and got into a fight with it.
Wilkins: Now let me tell you how the saw itself worked, because you asked what it cost and I mean to tell you the full bill. A ball from a rifle musket does not punch a neat little hole like a nail. It flattens and tumbles and shatters the bone like a dropped teacup, and the splinters go every direction, into the meat, into the arteries, into places they cannot be dug out of. A surgeon looking at a thighbone in forty pieces does not see a puzzle to put back together. He sees gangrene coming, and so he cuts.
Wilkins: The good ones were fast, just a few minutes. Some made a circular cut straight around, skin and meat, then pulled the flesh back like rolling up a sleeve. Others cut flaps, so there was a nice lid of skin to fold over the stump, like the crust on a pie nobody wants a slice of. Then the saw. A surgeon told me the bone sounds different from wood. Wood sings, and bone grinds, a wet, gritty sound, like a cobbler rasping a boot heel underwater. Then he tied off the arteries with silk or horsehair. When a tie slipped, the blood came out in spurts that hit the ceiling boards, and there were barn ceilings in Maryland painted red like a butcher's apron. Then the stump was dressed, the boy was carried out, and the leg went out the window onto the pile. Our boys came home talking about piles of arms and legs taller than a man, with the flies so thick on them they looked like they were moving on their own. I will not apologize for telling it plain, because those boys did not get to look away from it either.
Wilkins: And here is the arithmetic every soldier learned. The closer the cut to the body, the worse the odds. Lose a finger, a hand, a forearm, and you would likely be home splitting wood one-handed by harvest. Lose the leg high up at the thigh, and about half the men, or more, never got up again. A cut at the hip joint was close to a death warrant with a surgeon's signature on it. The papers called the surgeons butchers. But most of the time the butchering was what saved the life. A shattered leg left on a man rots, and the rot kills him slow and stinking over two weeks, and any surgeon who had smelled that once would take the saw over it.
Wilkins: Let me salute the Granite State, because we paid our share of that bill. The 5th New Hampshire Volunteers had some of the heaviest battle losses of any regiment in the Union army. Their colonel, Edward E. Cross of Lancaster, up in Coos County, was a red-bearded hellcat who tied a black kerchief on his head when he meant business. He was mortally wounded in the wheat field at Gettysburg in July of '63. A good many boys from this very valley came home from the 5th with a sleeve pinned up, or did not come home at all. You will see them on the porches along the Turnpike. Buy them a cider. Do not ask how it happened. If they want to tell you, they will.
Wilkins: Two more items for the history book. In 1862 Dr. Jonathan Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac, set up an ambulance corps and a ranked system of field hospitals, so the wounded went from the field to a dressing station to a proper hospital instead of lying in the corn for three days. Antietam was the first big test of it. That man saved more limbs with good organization than any saw ever did. And Surgeon General William Hammond took calomel, a mercury poison doctors had been pouring down soldiers until their teeth fell out, along with tartar emetic, off the army's supply table in 1863. As his reward his enemies hauled him before a court-martial and threw him out in 1864. Hammond threw the calomel off the supply wagon and the army threw Hammond off right behind it, which is how Washington says thank you. I say this as a dentist: calomel rots out more teeth than I have pulled in twenty years, and I have pulled enough to shingle a barn.
Wilkins: One more curiosity before we leave the history. On September first, 1862, by act of Congress, the United States Navy ended the sailors' daily grog ration. A whole fleet sober at once, in the middle of a war. The Navy took away the sailors' grog in '62, and to this day I cannot tell you whether the Union was saved by the Army's courage or the Navy's sobriety.
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and mournful
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Runners, Rascals, and the Sawbones of Pittsfield.
♦ Wax crackle, wind on the log walls
Wilkins: The county likes to call me 'the sawbones of Pittsfield,' though the only bones I saw are jawbones, and only when a molar puts down roots like a stubborn stump. I have been called a sawbones, a tooth-yanker, and a menace to the county, and the only one I ever sued over was 'amateur.'
Wilkins: Here is one the deputies would rather I did not tell. A Merrimack deputy, a soft fellow with a mustache like a dead squirrel, came sniffing up the Turnpike claiming a toothache. He asked for 'a little something to settle his nerves' before I pulled it, hoping I would bring out a jar and he would have his evidence. I bring out no jar. I bring out my old bone saw, the one I keep for cutting ham hocks, rusty teeth and all, and I lay it on the anvil next to his face, and I say, 'Now which tooth is troubling you, Deputy, or should I start at the neck and work down?' His nerves settled straight down into his boots, and a bit further, because I had to scrub the chair afterward. He squealed louder than a pig at a Pittsfield auction, and the pig had the better lawyer. Then Barnaby heard the squealing and came to the window to see if it was supper, and that deputy went out my door so fast he left his hat, and I have counterstamped it with my name and hung it over the still-house door.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That was not a coin, that was me tapping the hat for good luck. The sheriff says I have a surgeon's hands; my patients say I have a blacksmith's manners; Barnaby says nothing and eats the evidence. I would offer the Merrimack sheriff a leg up in this world, but I have seen what surgeons charge for those.
Wilkins: Now I have a guest come all the way up from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, a runner of spirits so slippery the revenue men down there quit chasing him and started placing bets on him. Folks, give a Granite State welcome to Junior Vance. Junior, sit down, mind the bear, and do not take your boots off, Barnaby has a weakness for feet.
Junior: Doc, I've been stared down by sheriffs, preachers, and my own mama, and none of 'em looked at me as hungry as that bear does. I'll keep my boots on and my toes counted.
Wilkins: Wise man. Tonight we are talking surgeons and saws and what whiskey did for the wounded. Your people down there fought in the war. What did they bring home?
Junior: My great-great-granddaddy came home to Wilkes County after the surrender with one thing worth a nickel, and it was a surgeon's bone saw. He never would say how he come by it. Granny figured some field surgeon left it in a barn in Virginia and Granddaddy figured the surgeon owed him for all the boys he'd carried in. Brass back, wood handle, teeth like a catfish. And Doc, that family used that saw for a hundred years to carve the Christmas ham. Called it 'the Colonel.' Every December somebody'd holler, 'Bring out the Colonel,' and all us young'uns'd go quiet, 'cause we knew what it had cut before it ever cut a ham.
Wilkins: Ha! A saw that went from cutting men to cutting pig. Now that is a promotion I can respect. Did the ham taste any different?
Junior: Tasted like ham, Doc, but nobody ever asked for seconds off the bone.
Wilkins: Now you have been on a doctor's table yourself, I hear.
Junior: Lord, have I. I was coming down off the mountain one night in my coupe with the lamps off, running dark, and a deer jumped out in front of me big as a church pew. I put her in the ditch and my head hit the steering wheel and split open like a ripe melon. Blood running down in my eyes so I couldn't tell which way was up. The cargo was fine, thank you for asking. I walked a mile to old Doc Tilley's place outside Wilkesboro, and he wouldn't let me in the house 'cause of his wife's rug, so he sewed me up in his hay barn by a coal-oil lantern. With fishing line, Doc, the same line he used for catching bream.
Wilkins: Fishing line! And what did he use for the pain?
Junior: He asked for his fee up front, one quart jar. Then he opened it, took a long pull, said, 'Steadies the needle,' and took another one. By the time he was done there was about a thimble left, and he splashed that on my head like holy water and called it doctoring. Seven stitches, crooked as a dog's hind leg. I've still got the scar. It's shaped like the letter S, and Doc Tilley swore he did it on purpose so I'd have my initials if I ever changed my name to Smith.
Wilkins: Junior's doctor drank half the fee to steady his needle; I drink the whole fee and send the patient to the bear for a second opinion. But listen to what that country doctor did right, friends, because he did one thing right. He did not put you to sleep on whiskey, Junior. He sewed you up wide awake.
Junior: Wide awake and cussing, Doc. I invented words in that barn the Baptists haven't caught up with yet.
Wilkins: The whiskey went into the doctor and not the patient, and that is about the most honest use of whiskey in medicine I have heard of. Tell them about your uncle.
Junior: My Uncle Hollis. Got bit on the hand by a timber rattler while he was cutting sourwood. And every old-timer in the holler hollered, 'Liquor! Liquor'll kill the poison!' So Hollis drinks a pint straight down, fast as a hog at a trough. Doc, his arm swole up purple and black like a blood sausage, and it was bleeding under the skin. We hauled him to the doctor in the back of a truck and the doctor looked at him and said, 'Who give this man liquor?' Every one of us pointed at somebody else. Doctor said the liquor got his blood moving and the bleeding and swelling worse. Hollis lived, but that hand never closed right again. Rest of his life he shook hands like he was holding a teacup.
Wilkins: The rattlesnake did half the work on Uncle Hollis and the whiskey offered to finish the job for free. Same lesson as the field hospitals, friends: whiskey is no medicine for shock or bleeding or snakebite. It only makes a dying man cheerful about it.
Junior: One more, Doc, 'cause it's about that war. Up the Brushies there was an old widow, Granny Pruitt, bought a little off me every month. Said it was for her rheumatism, and maybe it was. She measured every delivery in a beat-up tin cup with letters stamped on the side, 'U.S. Hosp. Dept.' Said her daddy carried it out of a Union hospital where he'd been a steward. And she'd fill that cup level and if one drop went over the rim, she poured it back in my jar and said, 'I pay for the cup, not the slop.' Forty years she'd been doing that. Wouldn't use any other measure.
Wilkins: A hospital steward's cup! That is the very cup they doled out the medical comforts with, one dose at a time, under lock and key. Granny Pruitt's steward cup is the only honest measure that ever came out of a war department. God bless that woman, Junior, she ran a tighter store than Lincoln's Treasury.
Junior: She'd have made a better sheriff than any I outran, and I'd have slowed down for her.
Wilkins: Junior Vance, of the Brushy Mountains, ladies and gentlemen. Mind the bear on the way out, Junior, and keep those stitches out of the rain.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Junior: Night, Doc. Night, bear. Keep your teeth to yourself.
♪ Fiddle reel, fading
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft.
♦ Fire crackling low under a copper pot, jar drip
Wilkins: A surgeon who takes his time kills his patient, and a distiller who hurries his fire kills his customers. Tonight I will walk you through the craft step by step, the way it was done in this valley. First the usual words from the bench: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and everything on this program is for history and learning only. Now, wash your hands like a surgeon ought to and could not.
Wilkins: Step one, the mash. My plain corn recipe: about eight pounds of cracked corn to five gallons of water. Bring the water near a boil, stir in the corn, and hold it hot for an hour and more, stirring so it does not scorch, till it turns thick as a porridge from a Concord boarding house. A double handful of malted barley stirred in once it has cooled some will turn the starch to sugar. Let it cool till you can hold your hand in it comfortably, which means cool enough not to kill the yeast. Pitch your yeast. Cover it loose so the gas gets out and the flies do not get in. Keep it in a warm spot and keep the room aired, because a working mash puts out gas that will smother a man in a closed room. In four or five days the bubbling stops and you have your wash, a sour beer of a few parts in a hundred spirit.
Wilkins: Step two, the still. Strain the wash so the solids do not scorch on the bottom and stink up the whole run. Fill the pot no more than three parts full, because a still filled to the brim boils over and pukes mash into your worm like a drunk at a wedding. Check every joint. A seep of vapor near an open fire is how still-houses burn, and alcohol vapor creeps along the floor like a snake looking for a flame. Keep the fire low and steady and keep a bucket of water and a sack of sand by the door. A still-house fire burns blue and fast, and you may not see it till your sleeve is already on fire.
Wilkins: Step three, the copper. Now the alchemy. Inside the hot pot, the sulfur stinks off the mash rise in the vapor, the rotten-egg and boiled-cabbage stuff, and the clean copper grabs them and holds them. That is why we use copper. The surface must be bright to do it. A pot left crusted after a run is like a surgeon who never wipes his saw: everything that passes through it carries yesterday along with it. Join your seams and fittings by silver solder or proper mechanical fittings, and never with lead, because lead is poison and it has sent more country drinkers to the graveyard than the revenue men ever sent to jail.
Wilkins: Step four, the cuts. This is the surgery of the craft, and you cut it the way a good surgeon cuts, in the right place, without flinching or getting greedy. First comes the foreshots, the first little splash off the worm. Throw it out. All of it. On a five-gallon wash I toss the first cupful and more, and I do not sniff it, sip it, or rub it on a sore tooth. It carries methanol, which blinds and kills. Then the heads, sharp and solventy, smelling like a varnish shop. They also go in the waste bucket, or into the lamp if you like, but never down a throat. Then the hearts, sweet and clean and smooth, the part worth all the trouble. Collect in small jars, one after another, so you can tell where one cut ends and the next begins. Do not pour it all into one bucket and pray. Then the tails come, oily and wet-dog smelling, and you set them aside to run again with the next batch.
Wilkins: The greedy man keeps a little of the heads to stretch his jar, and the surgeon who saves a little of the shattered bone to spare the boy a few inches saw the same result: the rot creeps back in, and someone pays. Cut clean. Throw away more than hurts. Barnaby gets none of it, before anybody asks.
♦ Barnaby grunts, offended
Wilkins: He is sulking. He thinks heads means ham hocks.
♪ Brassy pitchman fanfare on banjo and fiddle
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♪ Fanfare ends with a banjo flourish
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Call-In Line.
♦ Wax crackle, a cylinder being cranked
Wilkins: We have a message cut onto the wax for us from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Junior's home country. Let us hear it.
♦ Faint recorded crackle, tinny playback
Wilkins: The caller is Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, and his question runs thus: 'Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?'
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Rabbit, that is one large cent struck at my anvil in your honor, and I am mailing it south in an envelope so you have something real to show your uncle. Now, the truth. Your uncle has hold of half of an old truth and he is holding it by the wrong end.
Wilkins: Ash is not charcoal. Charcoal is wood burned without much air, black and full of little holes, and finished spirit run slow through charcoal does come out smoother. Ash is what is left after the fire eats everything, gray and powdery. Soak ash in water and you get lye. Here in New Hampshire our grandfathers cut whole forests and burned them for potash, boiled it down in kettles, and shipped it to the soap makers and glassworks. Lye takes the skin off your hands and the lining off your belly, and I have seen a boy who drank lye water by mistake and could only take broth for the rest of his life. Rabbit, putting lye in the thump keg is the one cure I know of that makes the patient and the disease die on the same afternoon.
Wilkins: As for red oak shavings, they will give the spirit a little color and a little tannin, a little barrel taste, and that is all. They take nothing bad out. A bad head is not cured in the keg. It is cured at the jar, by the man with the courage to throw his foreshots and heads in the waste bucket and stop looking at them. So your uncle is not lying, Rabbit, he is doing ritual. Like a man who taps his hat three times before a horse race, it comforts him and changes nothing about the horse.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now a myth for the whole valley, the blue flame. Men pour a spoonful in the lid, put a match to it, see the pretty blue flame, and announce, 'She's safe!' Friends, methanol, the blinding spirit, burns blue too, so pale you can hardly see it in daylight. The flame tells you there is something in that spoon that burns. It does not tell you whether it will kill you. A blue flame tells you exactly as much about your spirit as a blue coat tells you about a man's honesty, and I have known enough revenue officers to say so. Only clean cuts make clean spirit.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And a bit of slang, since we came for it. The boys home from the army call a surgeon a 'sawbones,' you know that one. But they also call the hospital steward the 'pill-roller,' and they call whiskey given out by the surgeon 'commissary' or just 'the medicine,' with a wink. So when a veteran on the Turnpike tells you he takes his medicine at four o'clock sharp, do not ask him which apothecary.
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, thank you for calling, and give your uncle my regards and tell him to leave his ashes in the fireplace.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
♪ Banjo and fiddle, slow and warm
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF.
Wilkins: That is the bill for tonight, friends. Our boys paid for the surgeon's saw with their arms and legs, and they paid with fevers and stumps and long nights on the porch, and whiskey paid for none of it, though it was always handed out as if it had. Respect the men who paid. Respect the craft enough to do it properly, with honest copper, honest cuts, and a low fire.
Wilkins: If you want to learn the craft from the mash barrel to the last jar, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course: the cooking, the copper, the cuts, the cleaning, and the safety, taught the way it ought to be, for history and learning and within the law. Ask about it at the Fort Wilkins showroom, and do not feed the bear on your way in.
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! For a still built right, the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is made of heavy-gauge pure copper with no lead in it. Order yours at moonshinestill.com or see it at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield. That is moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: And remember, making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law, and this program is for history and learning only. Junior, Rabbit, Barnaby, and you poor deputy under my window, I thank you all.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence