While I haven't gotten very far adding collateral Dorset relatives to my Ancestry family tree, I decided to work on my Scots instead, adding Alexander, my 3 x great uncle, to my Matheson family. It was when I was adding life events to his profile that I came across an event that I knew about but, somehow, writing out the outline made me look at the information in a different way.
Alexander Matheson enlisted in the Union Army in 1861. Various details of his service can be seen in muster rolls and pension records. He was wounded and taken prisoner in October of 1864. His right tibia was broken when he was shot. If he was going to be captured at any point, no doubt it was better timing that it was towards the end of the war.
I haven't yet traced the movements of G and B companies of the 14th and 15th Battalions of Illinois Infantry Volunteers to see which battles he was involved in. That will be a project for later. For now, the records show that he was at Big Shanty when he was wounded and was taken prisoner at Acworth, Georgia.
It would be interesting to plot out his movements on a map both before and after he was captured. Even after been wounded he moved around being transferred between hospitals. If that happened to him, it must have happened to many other soldiers too. It must have been hard being carted around from place to place in the horse and wagon age when too injured to walk under your own steam.
The treatment too, would have been fairly primitive, with amputation being common. When I visited Springfield, Illinois back in 2013, I remember seeing museum exhibitions about the practice of medicine in the Civil War. There were displays of the various implements used, scarily large some of them. But it was a time of medical progress as doctors and nurses learned from the sheer number of men being treated. It made me think about the difficulties of former soldiers once the war was over trying to get back to their lives which, in many cases, involved more physically activity than we are used to today. In Alexander's case, I believe that he kept his lower right leg but the impairment from his wound resulted in him receiving a pension.
Image:
By USG - The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (US Gov't Printing Office, 1870-88), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27857651
Sources:
Civil War Hospitals YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omq63mzHOfY
Civil War Medicine YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDYWP2fz4-E
Internet Archive – various books available about Civil War Medicine https://archive.org
PBS Learning Media https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/ms17.socct.cw.disinf/civil-war-disease-and-wound-infection/
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