Today, folks fuss about the media and sometimes strain to separate the believable from the inconceivable and truth from fiction. This is no recent development.
In 1874, The American Medical Weekly featured a stunning first-hand Civil War battlefield account by a physician. In an article entitled, “Attention Gynaecologists! – Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon, C.S.A.,” Dr. LeGrand G. Capers, a Confederate captain, wrote of an incredible event about a wounded soldier who was shot in a most unfortunate anatomical location. Said bullet, having traveled through just the right place in the soldier’s groin, impregnated a young woman who was nearby.
The vivid details of Capers’ May 12, 1863, account at the Battle of Raymond cited the doctor’s eyewitness account. The Confederate soldier reportedly fell to the ground and, almost simultaneously, a scream was heard from a nearby home.
While attending the infantryman, a mother approach Capers, pleading for assistance for her daughter. Capers’ journal recorded his aid to the young lass because a bullet “had penetrated the left abdominal parietes, about midway between the umbilicus and anterior spinal process of the ilium, and was lost in the abdominal cavity, leaving a ragged wound behind.”
This story, still published in the 1981 Farmer’s Almanac, reports the 17-year-old girl delivered a healthy boy that had a Minié ball lodged in his infant body. The story had Capers’ connecting the dots and the bullet to the Confederate soldier, who met the family and his offspring in order to later marry the young mother.