Doctors during the War of 1812 faced an uphill battle to save the lives of soldiers damaged by battlefield trauma or ravaged by diseases without known treatments. We often look at medicine before anesthesia or the discovery of germs as barbaric, but Kaitlyn Carter has a different perspective, choosing to see the humanity behind the history in a time when pain, service and heroism had a different meaning than they do today.
Doctors during the War of 1812 faced an uphill battle to save the lives of soldiers damaged by battlefield trauma or ravaged by diseases without known treatments. We often look at medicine before anesthesia or the discovery of germs as barbaric, but Kaitlyn Carter has a different perspective, choosing to see the humanity behind the history in a time when pain, service and heroism had a different meaning than they do today.
[00:00:00] ANNOUNCER: Welcome back to The Open Door, brought to you by The Brown Homestead in the heart of the beautiful Niagara Peninsula. This episode was originally intended to be a follow-up to last season's interview with acclaimed music historian Wade Pfaff about the history of jazz in Niagara. Sadly, Wade passed away suddenly, just a few days before we planned to record. We will always remember him fondly and with gratitude for the time he spent with us. Everyone feels his loss, and our hearts go out to his family and his friends.
Today, we are bringing you a previously unreleased episode that we recorded with Kaitlyn Carter. Kaitlyn worked with us at The Brown Homestead last year after completing a master's degree in history at the University of Western Ontario. Enjoy.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:55] AH: So welcome and thank you for taking the time to be with us today, Kaitlyn.
[00:00:59] KC: Well, thank you for having me.
[00:01:00] AH: Now, this is a very interesting area of research, and one of the things I'm curious about is what led you to it.
[00:01:05] KC: Well, it's kind of a funny story because I started my bachelor's degree planning to be a medievalist. Then I kind of go into Brock University and St. Catharines. I just fell in love with the War of 1812. So I worked at Fort George National Historic Site for a number of years. We had Scott Finlay who works for Parks Canada come out and give a talk on surgeons for us. He pulled out the big surgeon's kit with all the saws and knives and things like that. I just got very fascinated by that, and I wrote a paper in my second year comparing Napoleonic medicine to the Crimean War.
From there, it just kind of kept growing. I kept adding on and building on it and then kind of fell into this specialization which was not what I expected, as I said, but certainly not something I'm upset about.
[00:01:49] AH: Now, you say it's a specialization, and it really is because the War of 1812 is well-documented. But this particular area, the medical side of it is not particularly well-documented. There's not a lot of information available, is there?
[00:02:02] KC: There isn't any substantial secondary source or like a textbook written about the War of 1812. So a lot of the conclusions that medical historians who work on the War of 1812 make are pulled from Napoleonic Wars that are happening at the same time in Europe and using these primary sources, so these documents that are actually written by the physicians and surgeons of the War of 1812 like William Tiger Dunlop and James Mann. So we're kind of combining these two different wars that are happening at the same time to draw these conclusions about medical practices.
[00:02:35] AH: Something you spoke about in reference to this research is the role of the historian in part I think because there's sometimes criticism of physicians and surgeons of that period. They're characterized sometimes as butchers, and we tend to look down on what state the medical industry was in at that point. You have a different perspective on that.
[00:02:52] KC: I do a little bit. Yes. I think when you start studying medical history, one of the things that you become very interested in is applying our understanding of medicine to the past. That's not what you do as a medical historian. That's not your job. So I've taught or I've been a TA for a medical history course at Brock University a few times, and I find that the students are quite young. They're usually second years or first years. They like to try and diagnose medical figures a lot. So they like to look at George III and say, “Oh. Well, he clearly has dementia.”
I have to gently remind them every time that's not our job. So it's not our job as historians to diagnose figures in the past because understanding of disease isn't the same in 1812 as it is today in 2022. We're 210 years later, so our understanding of the body is different. The interesting thing is from my perspective is I can read these documents and want to, my understanding of medicine now. But that's not accurate.
The best example I can give is actually malaria. So malaria was very common in this area, and you'll read these diaries of people talking about how I have intermittent fevers and comes with the seasons. I shake and everything. I'm sitting here reading this. I'm like, “Well, dude, you have malaria. But he doesn't because malaria doesn't exist yet, and it wouldn't exist until the 1820s. So he has a different understanding of his illness than I do now. So I can try and apply that understanding, but it's not necessarily accurate.
[00:04:22] AH: So as historians, we want to understand the experience of the people in that time. By imposing our own knowledge, our own perspectives, our own biases on them through what we know now, we are distancing ourselves from their experience.
[00:04:36] KC: Exactly. One thing I always like to remind people when they get to triumphalist – we call it a triumphalist narrative in the history of medicine, the idea that we're always moving towards something better. I like to remind them that what we know about the human body is only what we think we know. Tomorrow, it could be entirely proven to be incorrect. Think about in 200 years, what are they going to say about our medical treatment? What are they going to say about like chemotherapy for cancer patients, right? These things that we see now as appropriate and the best option in 50 years even could be considered brutal because something better has come along.
[00:05:09] AH: In the spirit of that, to understand what we're going to be talking about, we might do well to define two terms that you used earlier, surgeons and physicians, in the context of the War of 1812 because those terms didn't mean then quite what they mean today, did they?
[00:05:23] KC: No. They're a little bit different. So what we're looking at are two kind of very different roles in civilian medicine. So civilian medicine and military medicine are both similar and very dissimilar in this time period which can be a little bit complicated. But when it comes to physicians and surgeons, physicians are the theoretical. So they're the people who are diagnosing. They're the people who have university educations, where surgeons are kind of the mechanical, the mechanics of the human body. So they're the ones who usually do apprenticeships, and they're considered lower status than a physician. So a physician makes more money, is considered more educated.
But one of the interesting things about the military is that you start to see these roles kind of overlap, and it's actually Catherine Kelly who argues that military medicine created such a unique environment for doctors, for lack of a better term. That these roles started to kind of – or this spasm between the two started to kind of be greatly reduced. It's in the 19th century, not quite as early as 1812 but more towards the end of the century that we start to see that gap lesson, and we start to see surgery become a respected art form in its own right. That happens in the 1850s, 1860s.
[00:06:42] AH: So this time period and this type of medicine in [inaudible 00:06:45] to that. That’s something you've talked about previously is how wartime medicine was a great training opportunity, great learning opportunity for prospective doctors, including especially those who came from working-class families.
[00:06:58] KC: It certainly was. The university education for a doctor in this point in time was only about two years. A lot of them are coming from the University of Edinburgh actually. So Surgeons’ Hall there that still exists is one of the best medical schools in Britain in this time. What they would do is they would enlist in the British Army with this education to get that practical experience that they didn't have.
Keeping in mind in this time period, they're still regulating cadavers. So you're only getting five cadavers a year. What they're doing in these classes is you'll have the professor lecturing. While the surgeon is down in kind of the base of the theatre actually cutting open the body and dissecting it. So these men have no hands-on experience pretty much. If they have any, it's very minimal. So they would enlist in the British Army to see these kind of traumatic gory wounds and these tropical diseases that maybe they'd read about but never seen, and they would serve so many years in the British Army. Then they would return to Britain and open these civilian practices.
I often like to compare the military medicine of this period as kind of like the residency of its day, right? Because we don't just graduate medical students and throw them into being doctors. We have them do more training, and it's kind of the same idea happening here.
[00:08:16] AH: Also, contextually, you've talked about the progress of medical discovery. Where does 1812 fall in that arc? For example, we know it was before anesthesia. But can you give us a few other markers along the road, so we can understand what the state of medicine was in 1812?
[00:08:31] KC: So I do hazard to use this word. But I think by our standards, we could consider it kind of brutal, maybe a bit barbaric. But as I mentioned before, I don't really like to hold 1812's medicine to our standards.
Now, the main practices that we're seeing in this period is the belief in something called miasmas. Now, miasmas translates to bad air, and what it essentially was was the belief that there was something in the air around sick people that was getting other people sick. Now, that's not quite Germ Theory yet. They're very close. There's a similar understanding, but they're still a little ways off. Germ Theory won't be discovered until 1860 by Louis Pasture. So if you've ever wondered where pasteurization comes from, that's where.
Now, with the idea of miasmas, there is developments in something we're all very familiar with today which is quarantine. But, of course, with the army, that's when those resources are available. Now, when it comes to actual treatments, we're in this interesting transitionary period between heroic medicine and more kind of curative treatments that we would consider them.
Now, heroic medicine, little medical history joke for you, we don't know if it's called heroic medicine because measures are so extreme or because you were a hero for surviving it. With heroic medicine, what that was was the belief that there are four humours in your body. So that's blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. When these four humours became unbalanced, you had to rebalance them by getting rid of excess fluids in your body. So that would include making people sweat, purging, the use of laxatives, and probably most famously bleeding.
Bleeding is kind of the one hangover that we still see a little bit later into the 19th century. But I want to make it clear. Like they weren't just like draining you of blood. They would bleed maybe about the same amount you'd donate when you donate blood. So you might be a little light-headed, but it wasn't killing you. People will look at this and think, “Well, why on Earth would you do that?” Because now we know keep your blood. It's important. You need that. But it makes sense when you look at it from a practical standpoint that if you bleed someone with a fever, their temperature is going to go down, right?
So they are seeing these responses to these treatments. They are very dramatic, but they produce an effect.
[00:10:48] AH: Even if they seem a little foreign to us now, the theory of the humours was the prevailing wisdom for quite a while. So we arrive at the War of 1812, and it's been estimated there are about 30,000 casualties on the two sides with the bloodiest battle being the Battle of Lundy’s Lane in 1814 with over 1,700 recorded casualties. So I guess my first question is what are the different types of battlefield injuries you would find in that type of conflict?
[00:11:14] KC: So the most common one is definitely musket ball wounds. So what we're looking at in 1812 is something called linear war tactics. Linear war tactics, of course, are when the men are standing in lines, literally elbow to elbow, so touching, and they're firing volleys at each other.
Now, muskets are relatively slow-loading weapons for what we know today. Fast at the time but they're very inaccurate. So the idea behind linear war tactics like that is that, well, if you have 100 guys firing at once, someone's going to hit something. But because they're inaccurate, that also means that we're not seeing the same types of gunshot wounds you see with rifles later in the world wars. You're not seeing like headshots or anything like that. Musket ball wounds are typically going to be kind of anywhere they land. So these are the most commonly survived ones.
Now, we also see cannonball injuries. Those ones typically are a lot more traumatic, so it's not as often that you'll see someone survive those types of wounds. In places where cavalry is used, you can see trampoline injuries. We don't typically see cavalry in Niagara in 1812 because our terrain just doesn't allow for it. You're also going to see sabre wounds. So the use of swords is still happening here. Those are typically slashing wounds.
One of the biggest things when it comes to your rate of survival in 1812 is where you are injured. So really, if you're injured anywhere in your torso, if you get run through with a bayonet in your torso, in your gut, there's nothing they can do for you because they can't prevent that infection. They can't stop that sepsis. Whereas when you're looking at like a musket ball wound to the shoulder, they can dig around in there and pull that musket ball out. Your chance of surviving is so much higher. Now, you might be left permanently disabled, but you're going to live.
But seeing the surgeon is kind of one of those things that you were going to die without it, or you had a chance to live with it. So while we look at these treatments that these surgeons are doing in response to these injuries, and we think, “Well, God, you're making it worse,” because we see a small gunshot wound or a musket ball wound, and we think why are you cutting off the entire limb. Well, that's because it's easier to care for a clean wound than it is to care for a dirtier one.
So these surgeries were painful. They were traumatic, but they were your best chance. That's why you would often undergo them, even if it was something that you didn't particularly want to do.
[00:13:40] AH: That leads to one of the complicating factors which is the treatment wasn't always immediate or even quick, which led to more instances of people bleeding excessively or even infection and dehydration.
[00:13:51] KC: Yes. Now, this is a story from the Battle of Waterloo. But Charles Bell, who is a civilian anatomist, if you've heard of Bell's Palsy, that's him. He discovered that nerve. Now, Charles Bell arrives at the Battle of Waterloo. Two weeks after the battle had taken place, he arrives in Waterloo, and there are still men on the battlefield. He writes in his letters to home to his brother that these men are crying out for two things, water and mercy.
So you can see just how challenging the job of a surgeon was because if you think about it, Charles Bell often gets criticized for having a high mortality rate. I believe his mortality rate was 7 or 8 out of 10 that he treated. But he's treating men that have been on a battlefield for two weeks, bleeding out, being exposed to dirt and germs, and not receiving any treatment. So the fact that he was able to save any of them, I think, is a testament to his skill.
I believe the same can be said for many surgeons working in 1812 as well that these surgeons are consistently fighting or losing battle against death.
[00:14:56] AH: So getting to the treatment or getting treatment was the first complication. Certainly, in the case of Lundy's Lane, a second complication was the volume of casualties. So how did the doctors decide who to take care of first?
[00:15:10] KC: Oh, that's an excellent question. So kind of the best resource we have for the Battle of Lundy's Lane comes from William Tiger Dunlop. So he gets the nickname Tiger because he shoots a tiger in India later on. He's a very fascinating man, and a lot of his medical documents read more like an adventure novel. So I recommend checking out his work. But he's got a very interesting section about Lundy's Lane.
Now, his first day in Upper Canada, which is modern-day Ontario, was actually July 25th of 1814. So it was the Battle of Lundy's Lane. Lundy's Lane happens on the hottest day of the year, of course. What ends up happening is Dunlop himself is personally in charge of over 200 injured men, and he ends up working for three days straight. He writes at one point about even falling asleep standing up on his feet because of how much he's been expected to work.
Now, how they would choose who they're treating first was actually a triage system. So they would typically do whoever was kind of the most injured. If they deemed you too injured to care for, they would make you comfortable if they could. They even pulled you off the battlefield if they deemed you too injured. But what's interesting is there is an exception to that. That's that if an officer was brought to the field hospital, they would be seen before the regular rank and file. So they'd be seen before the foot soldiers.
The reason for that is because the British Army is so incredibly class-based. So these officers are typically buying their places. They're buying their commissions. So these are men coming from the gentry, right? They're used to getting what they want. But the thing about officers is that you'll often sometimes see them deny treatment and ask to sit in a chair and set an example for their soldiers of how they should behave in their medical treatment. So they'll sit quietly and observe while they wait for the rest of their men to be treated.
[00:17:01] AH: Certainly a measure of individual character, if nothing else. The officers also had access to one other advantage over the rank and file. We referred earlier to the fact that there was no anesthesia, but there was some limited pain management available.
[00:17:17] KC: So in 1812, you're really going to see two types of pain management. Well, I guess three technically. One is alcohol. So they were using alcohol to kind of numb you for surgery. But the problem with alcohol is that it'll actually thin your blood, so they don't want to give you too much.
The other option that they had was opiates or opium. But opium is going to be in very short supply, and that's what's typically reserved for the officers. Niagara is woefully undersupplied. I believe Dunlop actually describes the quantity of materials for the British Army as one of the blunders of this blundering war in his memoir. So we really see kind of the disdain that surgeons have for their materials.
Then the third thing that you could really use was just shock. Shock is a hell of a drug. There's a story actually from the Battle of Waterloo again that I refer to. This comes from Charles Bell. There was a gentleman that he walks into a triage tent and sees this man sitting in a chair, having his leg amputated at the thigh. He is eating almonds out of the pocket of his waistcoat. I think that's just quite a tale of just, wow, that is shock right there.
[00:18:27] AH: Absolutely. Now, that hits your home even more when you have an understanding of exactly how these procedures were done. I'm going to pause here for a moment because we have the opportunity. Kaitlyn, as being very well-versed in this, can give us a fairly detailed description of what an amputation was and how it was done. But it's not for everybody, so we're going to hold that for the end of the podcast. So if you don't want to hear it, turn it off when you hear the music. If you do want to hear, how to amputate a leg, hang in after the music, and Kaitlyn will give you a pretty thorough tour of how that was done, all right.
Now, talking about pain and suffering, there were a number of different perspectives on that. One was a nationalistic perspective. The struggle, as it were, was part of the noble sacrifice made for king and country, right?
[00:19:17] KC: Oh, yes, for sure. What we're actually touching on now is my primary area research. So this is what I specialize in. Really, what it comes down to is that there's an expectation for British soldiers to be a good British subject. Not only that, but a good British man. So there is this gendered element. There's masculinity as a part of it.
The best example I can give of this kind of nationalistic tie to pain and suffering is a story from Edward Costello who is a member of the 95th Rifles. Again, this comes from the Battle of Waterloo because there are so many interesting stories that come from Waterloo. Edward Costello, similarly to many of these stories, walks into a triage tent, and he sees very similar to the story of the man sitting in a chair having his leg amputated. He sees a British soldier sitting in a chair having his arm amputated. He is actually holding his own wrist for his arm being amputated at the shoulder.
Next to this British soldier who is sitting very stoically, very quietly, kind of accepting the surgery, on the ground, there's a French soldier. This French soldier is having his shoulder probed for a musket ball. So a probe was like a long metal rod. They would stick it in the wound and try to see if they could find where the musket ball was. So it would be very painful to have this happen. This French soldier is, in Costello's words, bellowing lustily. So he is just screaming in pain.
I can tell you right now that if I were receiving these treatments, I would be the French soldier. But Costello writes quite admirably about this British soldier who's very quietly taking the medical treatment, and he's very snide about this French soldier. But what's very interesting is that the British soldier actually takes his severed limb once it's fully separated, and he whacks the Frenchman across the chest with it and says, and I quote, “Here, shove this down your throat and stop your damned bellowing.”
So that's a very entertaining story. But what's interesting about it is we don't know if it actually happened, right? It may have happened. It may have not. But that's not what matters. What matters is that we're contrasting British response to medicine to French. Which one looks better? Which one looks more courageous? Which one reflects the values of the army, right? That's the stoically, quietly, using that metaphorical, stiff British upper lip and accepting that medical treatment. So you see that comparison happening.
A great example closer to home is Shadrack Byfield. Now, Byfield is a private in the 41st Regiment of Foot. He's stationed at Fort George in Niagara. He's really interesting because he's the only memoir from this period we have from a private because privates are typically illiterate. He loses his arm at the Battle in Conjocta Creek, and he writes about his amputation. He describes the surgery as, “Tedious and painful but I was enabled to bear it pretty well.”
Then he writes in his memoir that only three days later, he was up and playing cards with the boys. So he's really kind of almost downplaying the trauma that he faces in losing his arm. But what's very interesting is that Byfield, when the orderly, so that was kind of a little bit of like a surgeon's mate, someone who was helping out in the hospital but didn't have medical training, went to take his arm and throw it into a refuge pit. So they buried medical waste in this period. Byfield becomes very angry, and he actually feels a disposition to strike the orderly. Now, he takes his arm back. He and his friends actually build it a small casket, and they host a funeral for it, and they bury it in a rampart at Fort Niagara.
[00:22:59] AH: Really compelling stories there, entertaining stories. Some probably should be taken with a little bit of a grain of salt, if we look at the history of France and England and their various competitive propaganda. But there's also probably a real grain of truth to a lot of them, and part of why I say that is because in that time period, the whole context and understanding and experience of illness and accidents and so on was very different than it is today.
You said earlier that you would have been one of the ones rolling around like the French soldier. I think most of us would have been, but we also didn't experience the ways of living and the omnipresence of these things in our lives that they did in the 19th century.
[00:23:36] KC: Yes. I think that's a really interesting point to make, especially because we live in a world where we can actively avoid pain for the most part. When we get a headache, we take an Advil or a Tylenol. They don't have that option in 1812. So the way that they think about pain is going to be different, and pain is something that is to be endured and something that is just a part of day-to-day life, whereas now we try to avoid it.
What's very interesting actually is we've mentioned anesthesia quite a bit. But when anesthesia gets introduced in the 1850s, well, it's 1845 it's invented. But its first use in a military context is 1853 in the Crimean War. There are surgeons who argue that you shouldn't use it, and there's a few reasons for that. One of the reasons is that they argue that you need that shock of pain to start the healing process, which is not accurate because I'm sure passing over pain is not good for you.
But the more interesting argument from my perspective is the surgeons that argue using anesthesia is actually emasculating that it takes away their chance to be a man. So when I said earlier there's a gendered element to it, there certainly is. There's that expectation that men are able to withstand this pain because it is part of their role. It is part of this contract that exists between men and the government that they pay this cost of national security with their pain and with their body. Their body is collateral for victory.
I think that that's something we see now in sports even. So it's not something that's gone away necessarily. It's just transformed to suit our modern society a little bit better.
[00:25:20] AH: No, that's true. When you look at things like concussions and brain injury in sports and culture around that, prevents that from being dealt with in a medically responsible way. There definitely are remnants of that, and it's very interesting that you make that comparison. Part of it you still see in the military today in terms of trading.
I remember a documentary with the sergeant major saying the basic training was essentially a form of brainwashing because when there are bullets flying all over the place, and someone tells you to get out of the hole you're hiding in, it goes against all your instincts to do it and have to create a mindset where people will actually follow those orders and do it. I think this is probably a very similar example of that from an earlier period.
[00:26:02] KC: I think so. When we're thinking about linear war tactics too, which I mentioned, you have to stand in a line and get shot at. Can you just take a second to think about the mental state you would have to be in to allow that to happen, the indoctrination that would have to happen for you to be willing to do that? What kind of thoughts and feelings need to motivate that?
The thing that the British Army needed to do is that they needed to create a reward for enduring this pain. The reward for enduring that pain was this narrative of heroics. It was if you didn't face it, you were a coward. You weren't a man. You weren't good enough. But on the flip side, like if there wasn't a positive to going through it, why on Earth would you do it, right? So the British Army had to associate this positive feeling with military sacrifice.
There's a book called Pain: A Cultural History by Javier Muscoso. What Muscoso argues is that pain becomes meaningful when it can be replicated. That's what I find very interesting in the idea of military sacrifice because anybody can go out there and get shot at in a volley for the British Army. So when you associate this really heavy meaning of military heroics of you’re making a sacrifice for your country, you are fulfilling your duty as a British subject and as a man, well, then you have more people willing to do it.
[00:27:34] AH: Now, we've been talking a lot about injury and what could happen to you on the battlefield. But the truth of the matter is that disease is a much bigger consideration, even than battlefield injury in this time period, wasn't it?
[00:27:45] KC: It certainly was. Matthew H. Kaufman who cites the fact that at any one time, anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the British Army would be incapacitated by disease. So really the main job of a military physician or a military surgeon was preventing disease or treating disease. There are several diseases that we see in this time period.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the most common in Niagara is malaria, which really surprises a lot of people because we tend to associate malaria with tropical climates. But in Niagara, we actually had the great Black Swamp, right? So if you've ever wondered why we have Black Swamp Road, well, we used to have about – I think it was around 1,000 to 1,500 square kilometres of just marshland kind of near Niagara on the Lake. Now, it's dried up, and that's why we have these beautiful fertile fields for vineyards. But in 1812, it's a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
Of course, as I mentioned earlier, they're not using the word malaria. But we can pretty confidently kind of associate that term with it. But that's one of the main diseases we're looking at in Niagara. We're also looking at like cholera, dysentery because they don't know that clean drinking water is important. We know that today. We're also looking at, well, for the British Army, very commonly venereal diseases.
[00:29:07] AH: Venereal disease was common enough that Brock commented on it at one point, didn't he?
[00:29:10] KC: He did. It's actually one of my favourite quotes. Sir Isaac Brock writes in a letter that Niagara-on-the-Lake, as it is now called, in the time referred to as Niagara or Newark, was, and I quote, “a nest of all wickedness.” That's because Niagara-on-the-Lake at that time was basically a soldier’s playground. So it was full of taverns and brothels and kind of all the joys in life, gambling halls and things like that.
I have to say, I think “nest of all wickedness” is a fantastic tagline for a town, and I think they should go back to it, instead of the prettiest town thing that they're going with now. But another interesting quote I have actually is from James McGregor who is the Head of British Military Medical Corps, and he actually said that he believed that the British Army single-handedly helped spread syphilis throughout the world. So he acknowledged the contribution that the British Army had made towards the prevalence of that disease, which I think is kind of funny. Not as funny for the women who often got blamed for it but funny.
One interesting thing if you ever want to insult someone is a little bit of slang from 1812 for you here is that if you wanted to imply that a woman of the night, let's say, was unclean, you would say, “Beware of her for I believe she speaks French.” Of course, because syphilis is known as the French disease by the English. It's known as the English disease by the French, and the Spanish know it as either.
[00:30:38] AH: Now, one of the stereotypical things often associated with the British Military is scurvy. Or was that more tied to the Navy than the Army?
[00:30:45] KC: We typically see scurvy a little bit more tied with the Navy. Now, by 1812, so James Lind makes his discovery of citrus being associated with scurvy earlier in the 18th century. But it's by the 1780s that they start regulating grog. The traditional recipe for grog is one part rum, 14 parts water, one part lime juice. Now, slowly, that recipe starts to become more parts rum and less parts water.
There's actually a surgeon who later on in the 19th century – this might be anecdotal, but it's a fun story. Later on in the 19th century, he makes the original grog recipe, and he and his barrels of grog get thrown overboard because the sailors are so upset by it. In the British Army, because they're on land, they're not going to be seen scurvy at the same rates that you see in the Navy, where you're at sea for months on end. But we still have those harsh Canadian winters.
So what actually ends up happening in the British Army is that they start allowing the soldiers to grow garrison gardens. So they're actually gardening just outside the walls of the forts. We know one got established at Fort George in 1803 after a mutiny over food conditions. That would allow them to supplement their rations and also get some fruits and vegetables into those soldiers.
[00:31:58] AH: So a really fascinating topic overall. I think we've really touched on some interesting areas. Something that you've talked about which I find very interesting in this is to remember as historians that we're not just talking about statistics. It's good to have fun talking about this, but it was a time of great suffering. As you said, every number was also a name.
[00:32:17] KC: Yes. I think that really kind of gets to the core of what my research is. So I do specialize in the history of emotions, and I look at the history of emotions through kind of the way that we're responding to pain. I got very struck by this because working at Fort George for as long as I did, we always had people asking, “Well, how many people died? How many people died here?” It was never, “But what were their names? What were their stories?”
I think after a while, and this isn't a reflection on the guests but it's a reflection, I think, on what we think societally of military history, it got a little grading. Because as you mentioned, behind those statistics are real people. We threw that statistic out at the beginning of the podcast that there were 30,000 casualties at the end of the War of 1812. Those are 30,000 people who had names, who had parents, who had people who loved them and people that they loved. They had hopes and dreams like we do, and their lives were permanently changed by this war.
So it is very fun to study military history, and it's fun to visit these wonderful historic sites we have throughout Niagara with the bright red coats and the flashy muskets and things like that. But it's very important to remember the real people that are behind these statistics. I think as historians, it's very important to us to remember that the job that we do is important. We have these people's stories. We have these people's lives in our hands. I do think it's our job to be gentle with them and to value the humanity that lies behind it all because the most interesting fact about history to break it down to four words is that people have always been people. You will find more similarities than you'll find differences.
[00:34:09] AH: Well said and we encourage you all. I know Kaitlyn will agree with me. We encourage you to visit these fascinating historical sites amongst us. But when you do, carry a little bit of that humanity with you, and remember those people, and remember that their labours and their sufferings are what helped build the society that we live in. I said it before. I'll say it again. I think Niagara is one of the best places in the world to live, and we owe an awful lot to those people who sometimes are reduced to numbers. So I want to thank you for that point.
I also want to thank you, Kaitlyn. Having now some of you listen to this podcast and listen to Kaitlyn's eloquence, how lucky we've been to have her with us at The Brown Homestead for the last 10 months now I guess it is. Sadly for us but happily for her, Kaitlyn is headed back to school to get a second master's degree. I thought you might want to say something about your new area of study.
[00:34:58] KC: Yes. So my first master's degree I did over the pandemic affectionately referred to my research there as my pandemic project. These archives were closed. I did it on something very random. I did it on hockey in the Cold War. But I'm very excited to be returning back to the War of 1812, and I plan on doing an emotional history of pain in the War of 1812. My eventual goal is to build this into a doctoral dissertation. So hopefully, I'll have my Ph.D. in the future, and maybe someday you can take a course with Dr. Carter, hopefully. That's the dream.
[00:35:30] AH: Absolutely. Take a course with Dr. Carter. You know what? We'll be inviting her back as well because she's always got some really interesting things to talk about. With that, we'll say goodbye. Thank you so much, Kaitlyn. For those who want to hear a little more of what she has to say, hang on after the music. Don't forget, we've got a little extra piece for you. All right, thanks again, Kaitlyn.
[00:35:47] KC: Anytime.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:35:52] ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening. Stick around until after the music if you want to hear Kaitlyn explain how to amputate an arm. Otherwise, now's the time to say goodbye. But be sure to subscribe today, so you won't miss our next episode. To learn more or to share your thoughts and show ideas, visit us at thebrownhomestead.ca, on social media, or if you still like to do things the old-fashioned way, you can even email us at opendoor@thebrownhomestead.ca.
[OUTRO]
[00:36:30] AH: Okay. So as promised, we are back, and we're going to listen to Kaitlyn explain how to amputate a leg. I don't think we need to say this but do not try this at home.
[00:36:42] KC: All right, let's get gory. When it comes to an amputation, the first step, as always, is get injured. That's one that the soldiers could do themselves. So when they're brought off the battlefield, they would be brought to the military surgeon. Now, Andrew said we're going to amputate a leg. I think it's easier to amputate an arm in this description because I have an arm in front of me. So I can explain it a little bit better that way. I should clarify. I have my own arm in front of me. I don't just have someone's random arm. That's a very important distinction. We don't want the police involved.
Now, the first step to an amputation is actually going to be to apply a tourniquet. Now, there's a new invention that's happened relatively recently towards the end of the 18th century, and that is a screw tourniquet. So it looks a little bit like a corkscrew, and you can Google these tools, and you'll be able to find pictures of them. What a screw tourniquet does is you twist it really tight, and it would cut off all the blood flow to the limb. That is actually what saved a lot of lives.
Now, the interesting thing about using a screw tourniquet is that a lot of soldiers and officers who later describe their procedures do say that the application of the tourniquet was the most painful part of the procedure. Now, what they're going to do next is they're going to take what's called an amputation knife. Now, an amputation knife is a rather large knife that's actually hooked. It's curved, and the sharp part of the blade is on the inside of that curve. The reason for that is because it can be placed on a limb and just wrapped right around, cutting through all that flesh straight to the bone.
Now, the next part from that is you're going to take trips of cotton fabric or linen, whatever you have. Sometimes, it was leather belts, and they're actually going to place it in that incision that they made. So let's say it's on your forearm. They're going to pull that skin back, place those kind of right against the bone, and then they're actually going to get a second person to pull all of the muscle and all of the skin back, and expose your tendons and your veins and things like that. Quite gory if you think about it.
Now, this is the part that always kind of makes me shiver is they're going to take a hook, and it's called a vein hook, actually. It looks like a sewing needle almost with a curve. So it's very fine hook. What they do with that is they lift all of the tendons and veins and arteries and things like that up off the bone. They do that so that they can tie it off with a silk thread. That's an interesting distinction between the British and the French is that the British are actually tying off the veins and the arteries thread, whereas the French cauterize it.
The reason that the British tie it off rather than cauterizing it is because they believe the amputation is already painful enough, whereas the French find it a little bit easier. They find it more reliable, and it's actually safer because it helps disinfect it. Of course, they don't know that severe heat kills germs. It's really just kind of a lucky thing that the French do.
Now, after they tie it off, they're going to sever those veins. They're going to sever those tendons and everything like that. Then here's the part that everyone kind of is waiting for. They get out that bone saw. It looks just like a normal saw you would use to saw wood. Now, there's two different sizes of saws. So you have the bone saw. That's going to be the big one for your arms and your legs. Then you're going to have the smaller one which is a metacarpal saw. Those are for your fingers and your toes. So it looks like a little tiny hacksaw. Then what they're going to do is they're going to saw through that bone.
Now, a good surgeon could do it in apparently about 15 kind of back and forth of the saw, and they could get through that bone pretty quickly. Now, this is a kind of a gruesome fact, which is that if they were ever really pressed for time, one of the things they could do to save time is they could saw halfway through the bone and snap it the rest of the way. We see evidence of that in those refuge pits that I mentioned where they're burying that medical waste.
Now, the next step is remember how I mentioned that they pulled all of that skin and muscle back. They're going to let that come down, and then they're going to close it around the end of the wound. They're going to sew it up, cover it with some bandaging, and pray to God that you don't get an infection. That is how you amputate a limb. So you guys are all set. You took my course, and you are ready to amputate whenever you need to.
[END]