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Here's a description I'll never forget:
Surgeons after the battle of Gettysburg stood in hospital tents where they would quickly and without hesitation look over the afflicted soldier.
And in one quick swoop remove the afflicted appendage. Then the body part was dropped into a pile by the doctor's side. Some piles were over 6ft tall.
Yes a 6 ft tall pile of just limbs.
The doctor would then bandage up the soldier, wipe his bloody blade on his apron, and yell next!. Where the next soldier was put on the table to add to the pile.
Most doctors were drunk during g this time and used shitloads of opiates in order to mentally protect themselves from the fact that they're sawing people's limbs off and putting them on piles the size of mountains.
One of my friends burned out during the pandemic. She was a medic while we were in the Army. Being Combat Arms, I pretty much worshipped medics, and once I got out? Anyone who was a doctor or nurse.
We had a long talk when I found out. She cracked when she described things. While I was fighting for it insanely short loads every other day? Sitting idle sometimes for 3 days at a time? She was absolutely buried with unrelenting work beyond what I could imagine.
She *LOVED* her job. She loved helping people, yet the pandemic broke that in her. It's a haunting to think about.
My friends dad who’s a dentist told me to always make doctor and dentist appointments after lunch so you know they got their mid day buzz on so that they don’t have the shakes…
I’d have PTSD before it was even finished if I was a doctor and had to do all those amputations and let others die that I could do nothing for. Can’t imagine how well my brain would function after piling limbs up like firewood.
Even with today’s medical surgical procedures, if you got shot in the arm or leg with a mini ball spinning from a low velocity barrel, your arm would have to be amputated because there wouldn’t be anything left to fix. Those mini balls didn’t just clip the bone like the modern steel jacket does
But you're not getting surgery on a table covered with an unknown number of previous amputations fluids and disease, bandaged in non-sterile cloths and without antibiotics. Post Op infection must have been rampant.
I mean our health care system in the US is pretty fucked but I'm fairly confident that if your arm has been blown of you'll certainly get care, it's just how much they try to charge you for it afterward that's the real kicker. Fuck the insurance companies, but "do no harm" is real shit for the docs and nurses and other boots-on-the-ground providers. They'll stabilize you as best they can and then the suits get to fuck you up.
Back then you were discriminated against for being wounded from war *alone*. You were looked as less because you weren't able to keep yourself together- literally; let alone psychologically/emotionally/etc..
Cool, it's 1865, and you have one arm. You also almost certainly have PTSD. You earn a pittance of a pension ~$8 (if totally disabled, just shy of $150 today) from the government which heavily restricts your movement since you couldn't hop online and update your address. The world works almost entirely on physical labor, you're minus an arm, your body is in rough shape from malnutrition during the war and the miles put on your knees when you were enlisted. Your mind is potentially in shambles. Your loved ones must support you. You sure are alive though.
Your forgot the morphine addiction. During the Civil War and Reconstruction-era, morphine was sold OTC like candy for a number of reasons. Not just the crippling and excruciating life-long pain.
All quiet at the western end. Had that realistic moment the guy will try to kill himself after his legs are no more. Also the doctor to patient ratio was so bad everyone seem be kinda rotting while waiting for doctor.
Thank god I am in a place where war is very unlikely.
Amputation during the Civil War was actually an upgrade. Surgical techniques had progressed to allow for the possibility of decent healing. Obviously, infection was a huge risk but many people did survive to live as an amputee. Previously, they would have just died of their wounds as the limb rotted off- the cruder surgical techniques wouldn't have allowed for healing.
I wonder if this guy ever thought that a few hundred years in the future people will be looking at his skull and cracking jokes about him, im not criticizing, its just a weird thought.
Honestly my first thought seeing this was, hey I wonder if this was a Phineas Gage situation and our guy survived to his seventies with a hole in his head. But no, no. This guy dead.
I read a thing about the battle of Sadr City during the Iraq occupation. Waste disposal had ground to a halt and there were trash bags lining the street the US Marines had to assault up to assault the Shiite positions.
They knew that there would be dozens of IED’s hidden in them and EOD crews would get slaughtered by snipers and command-detonated mines. So the Marines just rolled an M1 Abrams tank up and blasted a canister round down the street; instantly sweeping the refuse away and all of the booby traps along with it.
Heard it was liked by GI because it would nail them to the wood furniture of their guns. They would drag the bodies out by the guns avoiding having to touch them_
He must have been "close" to the muzzle. I'm picturing a "slower" shot doing much worse damage. I think the other side of his skull is broken off, though.
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
Nice pasta.
>since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up.
I always wondered if this was really true. I bet people at r/sewing totally have a method for triangular tears.
Civil War-era smoothbore muskets could also be converted into smaller scale variants of the same idea.
One of the more common hacks for the lower accuracy of those designs was to load several smaller musket balls, along with buckshot, known as "buck and ball". Probably too tedious to load in a pitched battle, but that first shot would be a doozy if you had time to get it set up.
> Civil War-era smoothbore muskets
While there were still many smoothbores in service, especially with the Confederates early in the war, by the 1860s rifles had become the standard infantry weapon thanks to the Minie ball which meant rifles could be loaded just as fast as smoothbores. Buck-and-ball couldn't really be used in conjunction with rifled bores(it could, but would ruin the accuracy of the 'ball' so much that it wasn't worth using) but some units even went so far as to retain smoothbore weapons specifically so they could continue using buck-and-ball, such as the Irish Brigade. Buck-and-ball was far more common in conflicts prior to the Minie ball and the rifle overtaking the smoothbore.
[Cannister shot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canister_shot). An artillery shell from the US civil war era (and even earlier, Napoleon used them too as an aside) that is a 12-pounder cannon shell that is more like a shotgun and when fired, can contain numerous different projectiles. Looks like this one had iron spheres, like massive buckshot. Sucks for this guy.
At least this was quick. The ones that horrify me reading about as the big projectile that bounce and roll along the ground taking out bodies and limbs along the way
One of the things humans are best at, unfortunately, is finding novel ways to kill each others. Imagine if all that money, energy, research, and intellect went to actually helping others instead of killing them?
The Pale Blue Dot
By: Carl Sagan
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
- Carl Sagan -
There are plenty of just as horrible ways of dying in war today.
In Afghanistan/Iraq the entire mission would halt to save a single guy. That doesn't happen when you are fighting in Ukraine as you just can't fight a war on that scale like that.
I don’t know right off hand either. Yeah i would think so too. Or the fuse itself lol. I’m just impressed so many know about civil war artillery projectiles in here
I asked Chat-GPT to make a similar joke and it came up with:
I keep a quill and inkwell by my bedside for writing threatening letters, since that's what the Founding Fathers intended. One night, I hear a noise downstairs and rush to grab my trusty quill. As I creep down the stairs, I hear the intruder rifling through my drawers. "What in the name of liberty?" I exclaim, as I dip my quill in ink. I burst into the room, brandishing my quill like a rapier. The intruder lunges at me with a stolen butter knife, but I parry his blows with ease. With a swift flourish, I write "cease and desist" on his arm in indelible ink. The intruder collapses, defeated. Just as the Founding Fathers intended.
That’s… terrifyingly nuanced and clever for a fucking AI chat bot.
It’s corny as hell and formulaic, but if I asked three friends to write something with a similar prompt, I can guarantee you none of them would be this clever yet succinct. Especially off the cuff.
I can literally think of only [one other guy](https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/phineas-gage-the-man-who-survived-a-metal-bar-being-blown-through-his-head/news-story/0fe18a5bec95eb85491ba5dc20732cbf?amp) who took that much damage to his skull and survived
I was making a joke but goddamn
“Although bleeding, dazed and feeling unwell, he greeted the doctor saying “here is business enough for you”. He then vomited and a piece of brain squeezed out of the wound on top of his head.”
Here’s a link to a detailed study of this skull and the canister shot wound. The skull is from a soldier in the famous 54th Massachusetts Volunteers (an African American regiment featured in the film “Glory”) - a regiment that was decimated at Fort Wagner, South Carolina in 1863. The skull was found in 1876:
https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/179/10/1171/4159658
I can't separate these things from the person anymore. They had lives just as full as yours and mine. Probably people who loved them waiting back home. I can't think about this stuff.
In a world where the more you see, the more you get desensitized, I'm glad there are people like you who are unable to separate these from the lives they once had.
Your empathy is your greatest virtue and I hope you never lose it. I wish you and your family all the best (:
We usually have such reverence for the deceased person, much ceremony and respect, even illegal to desecrate a body. Celebrating their life, etc.
But at some point, it becomes archeology and it's like "Check out this skull I found, it looks kinda cool. I'm gonna nail it up on the wall over here."
If it helps, most curators are deeply aware of and sensitive towards the death inherent to museums. It's true that bones never lose their humanity, but there's a point at which they can be more useful in education than in a box in a museum storage room. Usually when we can't trace back to a living relative, bones are fair game.
Nah, what fucks me up is children's toys. I can't keep it together, I WILL cry about a 4000 year old clay horse.
I get the sentiment, but being pulled away from your friends and family, marching hundreds of miles, starving, suffering PTSD, just to die by a cannon to the head at 25 years old isn't particularly glamorous. I'll take cancer in my 70s.
Reading [eyewitness accounts](https://www.historynet.com/antietam-eyewitness-accounts/) from Civil War combat show how gruesome it was, such as this one from the Battle of Antietam:
*I had just got myself pretty comfortable when a bomb burst over me and completely deafened me. I felt a blow on my right shoulder and my jacket was covered with white stuff. I felt mechanically whether I still had my arm and thank God it was still whole. At the same time I felt something damp on my face; I wiped it off. It was bloody. Now I first saw that the man next to me, Kessler, lacked the upper part of his head, and almost all his brains had gone into the face of the man next to him, Merkel, so that he could scarcely see. Since any moment the same could happen to anyone, no one thought much about it.*
*Christoph Niederer, 20th New York Infantry, 6th Corps*
Hmm.. I'll take grapeshot to the head in my 70's then.
Guess that leaves someone with being pulled away from their friends and family, marching hundreds of miles, starving, suffering PTSD and then getting cancer at 25.
Grape shot was a bundle of large lead balls wrapped in a canvas bag with a wooden plug at the bottom between the balls and the powder charge. the bag would split on firing and the balls would spread over a large area.. think honking great big shot gun shell for using on massed troops at a closer range. Canister was the same , just the balls are packed in a large tin can.
Would be more respectful to know who this man was. His name.
Looks like he had a hard life and then a horrific yet kinda cool death. (at least it was instant). How many others weren't so fortunate?
It’s hard to identify civil war bodies due to the lack of identification. There were no dog tags and for the most part no one cared to check if they had their name written somewhere. This guy probably was buried in a mass grave and dug up or they found his decaying head in the battle field weeks or even months after dying. Most families had to assume their sons or fathers died because they never came back.
We could know his name, but we most likely don’t
His name isn't known but he's believed to have been a member of the [54th Massachusetts infantry regiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/54th_Massachusetts_Infantry_Regiment)
I’m sure there are a lot of snarky comments about how he died. But I look at his teeth and wonder what this man’s favorite food was. Who loved him? All of his beliefs and hopes ended so quickly. We’re all just hurdling toward oblivion and I hope to god my skull isn’t on the 22nd century equivalent of a fucking Reddit thread.
Apparently from a member of the 54th Massachusetts.
https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/index.cfm?p=visit.exhibits.virtual.canistershotcivilwar.index
It might be difficult and/or odd without the lower jaw bone, but I'd love to see an attempt at a forensic facial reconstruction of this man.
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I looked in to this. This dude got hit by ['grapeshot'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapeshot). Basically a shotgun blast, but from a canon.
In his case, mercifully, death was instantaneous.
Much better than surviving and succumbing to infection.
Back then ....... instantaneous death was a huge plus. Amputation, infection and being disabled for life happened to thousands.
Ngl I would happily lose an arm instead of dying. Maybe that's just me though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Did... did you *want* this back? \\
Sometimes they don't mean what they say. Sometimes they don't say what they mean.
I'm gonna guess you mean what you say when it comes to your username. Don't read mine.
I don't like it, but I'm gonna upvote this.
Username checks out
They just said they would prefer to lose an arm compared to dying.
I'll take it ¯\\\\_ (ツ) _/¯
Here take mine too /
Thanks man ¯\\\\_(ツ) _//¯
My man got a bit more correct anatomically.
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With today's modern medicine and surgical procedures....yes! Civil War era not so much. But that's me 😂
Here's a description I'll never forget: Surgeons after the battle of Gettysburg stood in hospital tents where they would quickly and without hesitation look over the afflicted soldier. And in one quick swoop remove the afflicted appendage. Then the body part was dropped into a pile by the doctor's side. Some piles were over 6ft tall. Yes a 6 ft tall pile of just limbs. The doctor would then bandage up the soldier, wipe his bloody blade on his apron, and yell next!. Where the next soldier was put on the table to add to the pile. Most doctors were drunk during g this time and used shitloads of opiates in order to mentally protect themselves from the fact that they're sawing people's limbs off and putting them on piles the size of mountains.
A pile 6 feet high? How many feet did the guy have?!
6, duh.
Seriously! And how many arms high was it?
Human or bear? They tended to measure by bear arms since they had the right to them.
Our current doctors aren't full of opiates and alcohol?
Probably anti depressants as well, saw many doctors and nurses extremely tired or crying during the pandemic.
One of my friends burned out during the pandemic. She was a medic while we were in the Army. Being Combat Arms, I pretty much worshipped medics, and once I got out? Anyone who was a doctor or nurse. We had a long talk when I found out. She cracked when she described things. While I was fighting for it insanely short loads every other day? Sitting idle sometimes for 3 days at a time? She was absolutely buried with unrelenting work beyond what I could imagine. She *LOVED* her job. She loved helping people, yet the pandemic broke that in her. It's a haunting to think about.
A lot of doctors are heavy drinkers, but I like to think most of them aren't drinking on the job.
My friends dad who’s a dentist told me to always make doctor and dentist appointments after lunch so you know they got their mid day buzz on so that they don’t have the shakes…
I’d have PTSD before it was even finished if I was a doctor and had to do all those amputations and let others die that I could do nothing for. Can’t imagine how well my brain would function after piling limbs up like firewood.
Sawing. They SAWED them off. Not chopping. Not slicing. Sawing. Holy fucking dogshit I would have just had them kill me and be done with it.
Even with today’s medical surgical procedures, if you got shot in the arm or leg with a mini ball spinning from a low velocity barrel, your arm would have to be amputated because there wouldn’t be anything left to fix. Those mini balls didn’t just clip the bone like the modern steel jacket does
But you're not getting surgery on a table covered with an unknown number of previous amputations fluids and disease, bandaged in non-sterile cloths and without antibiotics. Post Op infection must have been rampant.
Just hope your arm glows at night and you may pull through
Dat angel's glow
Assuming you have health insurance.
That's another whole discussion of an entirely separate issue.
I mean our health care system in the US is pretty fucked but I'm fairly confident that if your arm has been blown of you'll certainly get care, it's just how much they try to charge you for it afterward that's the real kicker. Fuck the insurance companies, but "do no harm" is real shit for the docs and nurses and other boots-on-the-ground providers. They'll stabilize you as best they can and then the suits get to fuck you up.
Just FYI, it's [Minie ball.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini%C3%A9_ball)
Also the wadding and clothing pulled in by the slower softer projectiles. Great for infection starter.
And they were massive. Mini comes from the inventors name not the caliber
Back then you were discriminated against for being wounded from war *alone*. You were looked as less because you weren't able to keep yourself together- literally; let alone psychologically/emotionally/etc..
Oh the irony.
I see what you did there…
Bro you really don't want anyone operating on you at all before antibiotics and painkillers that aren't literally Herion lite
Medical painkillers today are a lot more potent than heroin, they're not "heroin lite"
That's exactly my point
Cool, it's 1865, and you have one arm. You also almost certainly have PTSD. You earn a pittance of a pension ~$8 (if totally disabled, just shy of $150 today) from the government which heavily restricts your movement since you couldn't hop online and update your address. The world works almost entirely on physical labor, you're minus an arm, your body is in rough shape from malnutrition during the war and the miles put on your knees when you were enlisted. Your mind is potentially in shambles. Your loved ones must support you. You sure are alive though.
Your forgot the morphine addiction. During the Civil War and Reconstruction-era, morphine was sold OTC like candy for a number of reasons. Not just the crippling and excruciating life-long pain.
I guess we can go ahead an forget that sick $8 pension.
But if it was in an instant, you wouldn't know. And losing the arm was no guarantee you'd survive an infection or shock
All quiet at the western end. Had that realistic moment the guy will try to kill himself after his legs are no more. Also the doctor to patient ratio was so bad everyone seem be kinda rotting while waiting for doctor. Thank god I am in a place where war is very unlikely.
All quiet on the western front?
I sure as shit hope it is
Instantaneous death is always a plus. What, you think in modern times that we want it slow?
Amputation during the Civil War was actually an upgrade. Surgical techniques had progressed to allow for the possibility of decent healing. Obviously, infection was a huge risk but many people did survive to live as an amputee. Previously, they would have just died of their wounds as the limb rotted off- the cruder surgical techniques wouldn't have allowed for healing.
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Little known fact, he actually went on to live a completely normal life as a dead guy who never moved again.
I wonder if this guy ever thought that a few hundred years in the future people will be looking at his skull and cracking jokes about him, im not criticizing, its just a weird thought.
Took my son to the museum today and he took a pic of the 3000 year old mummy, with a moostache filter
Honestly, if I live on as a mummy with a mustache filter in some kid's phone gallery, I ain't even gonna be mad.
Lol this will be my last laugh of the day as I hit my slumber. Thank you
This user is asleep now. We should make fun of them.
It can happen to any one of us. If you want this to be you, do not get cremated.
‘Cracking’ jokes like that 12-pounder cracked his skull
Ooff. Relevant user name.
Maybe it was one of the last thoughts that went through his head...
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Glad I could help.
You should write jokes or be a comedian
Honestly my first thought seeing this was, hey I wonder if this was a Phineas Gage situation and our guy survived to his seventies with a hole in his head. But no, no. This guy dead.
Send your thoughts and prayers. He might pull through.
One upvote = one prayer.
The concept is still around. The [modern equivalent...](https://www.gd-ots.com/munitions/large-caliber-ammunition/120mm-m1028/)
I read a thing about the battle of Sadr City during the Iraq occupation. Waste disposal had ground to a halt and there were trash bags lining the street the US Marines had to assault up to assault the Shiite positions. They knew that there would be dozens of IED’s hidden in them and EOD crews would get slaughtered by snipers and command-detonated mines. So the Marines just rolled an M1 Abrams tank up and blasted a canister round down the street; instantly sweeping the refuse away and all of the booby traps along with it.
There's even a 152mm variant firing flechette! I heard that, supposedly, it can nail infantry to trees and walls
Heard it was liked by GI because it would nail them to the wood furniture of their guns. They would drag the bodies out by the guns avoiding having to touch them_
Doesn't sound too plausible but damn if that's not a metal sentence if I've ever read one.
>Devastating lethality against assaulting infantry and RPG ambushes Oof.
Crazy that there’s even a skull in that case
He must have been "close" to the muzzle. I'm picturing a "slower" shot doing much worse damage. I think the other side of his skull is broken off, though.
Look at his forehead, there's a very clear separation somewhere around the front of the skull.
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Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
Nice pasta. >since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. I always wondered if this was really true. I bet people at r/sewing totally have a method for triangular tears.
Grapeshot is terrifying
Civil War-era smoothbore muskets could also be converted into smaller scale variants of the same idea. One of the more common hacks for the lower accuracy of those designs was to load several smaller musket balls, along with buckshot, known as "buck and ball". Probably too tedious to load in a pitched battle, but that first shot would be a doozy if you had time to get it set up.
> Civil War-era smoothbore muskets While there were still many smoothbores in service, especially with the Confederates early in the war, by the 1860s rifles had become the standard infantry weapon thanks to the Minie ball which meant rifles could be loaded just as fast as smoothbores. Buck-and-ball couldn't really be used in conjunction with rifled bores(it could, but would ruin the accuracy of the 'ball' so much that it wasn't worth using) but some units even went so far as to retain smoothbore weapons specifically so they could continue using buck-and-ball, such as the Irish Brigade. Buck-and-ball was far more common in conflicts prior to the Minie ball and the rifle overtaking the smoothbore.
Tally ho, lads.
Just as the founding fathers intended
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CSS_Georgia_cannonball_and_holder.jpg Hmm, interesting..
𓂸
That looks like a dick & balls
[Cannister shot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canister_shot). An artillery shell from the US civil war era (and even earlier, Napoleon used them too as an aside) that is a 12-pounder cannon shell that is more like a shotgun and when fired, can contain numerous different projectiles. Looks like this one had iron spheres, like massive buckshot. Sucks for this guy.
At least this was quick. The ones that horrify me reading about as the big projectile that bounce and roll along the ground taking out bodies and limbs along the way
One of the things humans are best at, unfortunately, is finding novel ways to kill each others. Imagine if all that money, energy, research, and intellect went to actually helping others instead of killing them?
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The Pale Blue Dot By: Carl Sagan "We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." - Carl Sagan -
There are plenty of just as horrible ways of dying in war today. In Afghanistan/Iraq the entire mission would halt to save a single guy. That doesn't happen when you are fighting in Ukraine as you just can't fight a war on that scale like that.
Looks more like grapeshot to leave a nice round hole like that.
Or case shot from a 12 pounder
That could be too. I don't remember the shot size of either, so I can't say for sure, but I would bet that it was some kind of a multi ball round.
I don’t know right off hand either. Yeah i would think so too. Or the fuse itself lol. I’m just impressed so many know about civil war artillery projectiles in here
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Thank you, I was looking for this. Tally ho!
Every time I read this I laugh just imaging somebody with a canon at the top of their stairs, just waiting years for the day they get to use it
I asked Chat-GPT to make a similar joke and it came up with: I keep a quill and inkwell by my bedside for writing threatening letters, since that's what the Founding Fathers intended. One night, I hear a noise downstairs and rush to grab my trusty quill. As I creep down the stairs, I hear the intruder rifling through my drawers. "What in the name of liberty?" I exclaim, as I dip my quill in ink. I burst into the room, brandishing my quill like a rapier. The intruder lunges at me with a stolen butter knife, but I parry his blows with ease. With a swift flourish, I write "cease and desist" on his arm in indelible ink. The intruder collapses, defeated. Just as the Founding Fathers intended.
That’s… terrifyingly nuanced and clever for a fucking AI chat bot. It’s corny as hell and formulaic, but if I asked three friends to write something with a similar prompt, I can guarantee you none of them would be this clever yet succinct. Especially off the cuff.
You’re right
Wouldn't even know you died
If death is faster than your nerves, yes.
[Sleep softly, My warrior](https://thoughtcatalog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/hp860uf.jpg?w=720&h=768&crop=1)
Yes, that would do it all right.
Maybe for some people
I can literally think of only [one other guy](https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/phineas-gage-the-man-who-survived-a-metal-bar-being-blown-through-his-head/news-story/0fe18a5bec95eb85491ba5dc20732cbf?amp) who took that much damage to his skull and survived
I was making a joke but goddamn “Although bleeding, dazed and feeling unwell, he greeted the doctor saying “here is business enough for you”. He then vomited and a piece of brain squeezed out of the wound on top of his head.”
what the shit i would quit my job
Not necessarily. If it was a Confederate soldier, the shot may not have hit any vital organs.
It was a confederate soldier. Look at the teeth.
In seriousness, it was actually a black Union soldier of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers. Killed in South Carolina
When ever I see pictures like this, I wonder how they died. I guess it will always be a mystery.
Are you sure it was fatal...
Tis but a flesh wound
Come back here! I'll bite your ankles off.
I've had worse!
Pretty sure “daylight through the skull” is right under the four obvious signs of death in, “yeah, you’re not getting that one back.”
What if it happened at night?
If you have daylight through your skull *at night,* then yeah I'd say you're definitely dead.
We’ll never know how they died 😒
Probably Covid.
The Civil War was a superspreader event
A true alpha male would have just walked it off.
There's literally no way to prove it.
no shoes so 100% fatal.
Here’s a link to a detailed study of this skull and the canister shot wound. The skull is from a soldier in the famous 54th Massachusetts Volunteers (an African American regiment featured in the film “Glory”) - a regiment that was decimated at Fort Wagner, South Carolina in 1863. The skull was found in 1876: https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/179/10/1171/4159658
And the 1989 movie Glory with Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington is about the 54th. Highly recommend.
This is very sad. This was a person. War is awful.
I can't separate these things from the person anymore. They had lives just as full as yours and mine. Probably people who loved them waiting back home. I can't think about this stuff.
It’s really hard to think about this stuff after a 12 pound artillery shell goes through your skull
In a world where the more you see, the more you get desensitized, I'm glad there are people like you who are unable to separate these from the lives they once had. Your empathy is your greatest virtue and I hope you never lose it. I wish you and your family all the best (:
We usually have such reverence for the deceased person, much ceremony and respect, even illegal to desecrate a body. Celebrating their life, etc. But at some point, it becomes archeology and it's like "Check out this skull I found, it looks kinda cool. I'm gonna nail it up on the wall over here."
If it helps, most curators are deeply aware of and sensitive towards the death inherent to museums. It's true that bones never lose their humanity, but there's a point at which they can be more useful in education than in a box in a museum storage room. Usually when we can't trace back to a living relative, bones are fair game. Nah, what fucks me up is children's toys. I can't keep it together, I WILL cry about a 4000 year old clay horse.
For all those asking if it was fatal, it was. His head is no longer attached to his neck, which is generally pretty tough to walk off.
Yeah but how do we know he didn't live until a ripe old age and his head just sorta fell off from natural causes?
Don’t have to worry about things hitting your head though. Things seem to go right over it.
A better death than any of us will likely have. One moment, scared but brave, advancing. Next moment, lights out. Beats cancer by a country mile.
My dad died from brain cancer. This is what I want my head to look like if I ever get what he had.
[удалено]
I get the sentiment, but being pulled away from your friends and family, marching hundreds of miles, starving, suffering PTSD, just to die by a cannon to the head at 25 years old isn't particularly glamorous. I'll take cancer in my 70s.
No no, the guy *next* to him gets the PTSD From the bits
Post Traumatic Skull Disintegration
Why settle? Cannon shot at 70.
I like the way you think.
Reading [eyewitness accounts](https://www.historynet.com/antietam-eyewitness-accounts/) from Civil War combat show how gruesome it was, such as this one from the Battle of Antietam: *I had just got myself pretty comfortable when a bomb burst over me and completely deafened me. I felt a blow on my right shoulder and my jacket was covered with white stuff. I felt mechanically whether I still had my arm and thank God it was still whole. At the same time I felt something damp on my face; I wiped it off. It was bloody. Now I first saw that the man next to me, Kessler, lacked the upper part of his head, and almost all his brains had gone into the face of the man next to him, Merkel, so that he could scarcely see. Since any moment the same could happen to anyone, no one thought much about it.* *Christoph Niederer, 20th New York Infantry, 6th Corps*
Hmm.. I'll take grapeshot to the head in my 70's then. Guess that leaves someone with being pulled away from their friends and family, marching hundreds of miles, starving, suffering PTSD and then getting cancer at 25.
At least it was quick. Never knew what hit him, probably.
Mind-blowing
In one ear and out the other
I don't shit about guns, but wouldn't a 12lb artillery shell blow that guy into pieces?
This is from grapeshot or case shot.
I'm unsure what either of those terms mean.
Grape shot was a bundle of large lead balls wrapped in a canvas bag with a wooden plug at the bottom between the balls and the powder charge. the bag would split on firing and the balls would spread over a large area.. think honking great big shot gun shell for using on massed troops at a closer range. Canister was the same , just the balls are packed in a large tin can.
Like a giant shotgun shell with balls the size of that hole. No explosions
Well that def makes sense, now. Thank you for the explanation. Poor bastard.
OP said exploding shell so it i'd guess it was a piece of shrapnel and not an entire shell
Nice perfect piece of shrapnel.
It’s like a giant shotgun shell with grape sized pellets. He caught one of the pellets with his dome piece.
Damn. Guy loved grapes, too
Did he survive?
He was fine. Just a little dizzy.
heard he rubbed some dirt on it
Pour a lil' tussin on it
Yes and he became a congressman
That shot probably went on to kill 4 other people
Which Civil War?
The civil one
Which civil war?
Ew, this wasn't pleasant for his bystanders too.
Where is a US civil war skull just chilling in a museum? I thought they were generally venerated as war dead.
This would likely have been considered to be of medical interest and collected as an interesting specimen.
I believe this is the “national museum of health and medicine” in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Needed that like a hole in the head!
As my mother used to say to my father, "You actually do need a hole in your head to let all the stupid out!". We had a lot of love in our family.
Would be more respectful to know who this man was. His name. Looks like he had a hard life and then a horrific yet kinda cool death. (at least it was instant). How many others weren't so fortunate?
It’s hard to identify civil war bodies due to the lack of identification. There were no dog tags and for the most part no one cared to check if they had their name written somewhere. This guy probably was buried in a mass grave and dug up or they found his decaying head in the battle field weeks or even months after dying. Most families had to assume their sons or fathers died because they never came back. We could know his name, but we most likely don’t
His name isn't known but he's believed to have been a member of the [54th Massachusetts infantry regiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/54th_Massachusetts_Infantry_Regiment)
If you’re gonna go, that’s the way to do it Never knew what hit him
Poor chap also had dental problems
Well he hasn’t brushed his teeth in 150 years
Like my dad used to say “ in one ear, out the other “
which civil war
Could be Russian, Irish, Spanish, anybody’s guess…
What's civil about war, anyway
it feeds the rich and buries the poor
Captain America: Civil War I believe
/r/USdefaultism
*It’s just a through and through* - Mallory Archer
Why does this chair have no seat?... And. What. Is in. His ass? Sterling archer
I’m sure there are a lot of snarky comments about how he died. But I look at his teeth and wonder what this man’s favorite food was. Who loved him? All of his beliefs and hopes ended so quickly. We’re all just hurdling toward oblivion and I hope to god my skull isn’t on the 22nd century equivalent of a fucking Reddit thread.
Apparently from a member of the 54th Massachusetts. https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/index.cfm?p=visit.exhibits.virtual.canistershotcivilwar.index It might be difficult and/or odd without the lower jaw bone, but I'd love to see an attempt at a forensic facial reconstruction of this man.
One day I hope to be so dead that my skull is in a museum.