Die Once Live Twice by Lawrence Dorr Page B

I understand. That is all that I will do.” He spun around and hurried back the way he had come, calling over his shoulder to give the patient some laudanum.
    Franklin briskly moved out of the farmhouse to his operating theater. His operating table was a door set on four sawhorses under the branches of a large oak tree. Four dressers, his aides, restrained a patient when the anesthetic powers of whiskey were insufficient. Ether, administered by a physician colleague of Franklin’s, was in short supply and reserved for officers.
    “Two of you,” Franklin nearly shouted, “go out back and bring a body to me.” The tool shed behind the house was a morgue for the dead waiting to be buried. As two dressers hurried off, Franklin said to his anesthetist, “I will need you for this operation, but I have to practice on a corpse. Go get some coffee.”
    Franklin was inexperienced and barely competent—which was the standard for the Union Army—but determined to improve his skills. He frequently operated on the dead to learn anatomy and improve his technique. While the dressers laid a stiff corpse on the operating table, Franklin pulled his table of four blood-stained tools—a forceps, scalpel, tissue clamp, and saw—closer to him. Franklin cleaned these by wiping the fresh blood off on his apron, which he donned over his uniform.
    He made an incision in the thigh of the corpse. No worry about blood in this operation, he thought with a smile. Slicing the fat and muscle with the scalpel, he opened the leg so he could feel with his left thumb and index finger for the femur bone. A strong band of tissue resisted him. He cut into that. “Hold this open for me,” Franklin said to a dresser, who used his bare hands to pull the wound edges apart. I’ve never quite had this view, Franklin thought with some excitement. Exploring the inside of the leg he found the main nerves and the femoral artery. “I must avoid this artery or he’ll bleed to death,” Franklin commented to the dresser. He memorized the relationships of the anatomical structures.
    Finally Franklin stood and wiped off his tools on his pant leg. “Okay, boys, take the stiff back and bring out the live one. Tell the anesthetist to finish his coffee. It’s time for me to take out this conceited captain’s musket ball, though he’ll probably just get an infection and lose the leg anyway.”
    Patrick’s drugged sleep was rudely interrupted by four men lifting him from his cot to a stretcher. Crying out in pain, Patrick was told by one of the dressers, “Shut up. You’re about to get some ether. Lucky you’re an officer.” The four stretcher-bearers delivered him to Franklin, waiting under the shade of the old oak tree.
    Franklin was sweating before he even cut into Patrick. Swirls of smoke drifted into the tree as the ash of his cigar grew while he worked. Following the track of the musket ball by sticking his bare index finger into the leg, he felt wadding. He ripped open the muscle and motioned to the dresser to spread the wound, but his hands were slick with blood and he slipped once before he got it open. Franklin spied the wadding and grabbed it with a forceps. “Gotcha,” he exclaimed in triumph as he removed it. With the knife he cut away more muscle and groped around the broken bone for the musket ball. “Ouch, dammit.” He spit out the words around his cigar as he cut his finger on a spike of the broken bone. As he quickly withdrew his hand, the musket ball came with it. He held it up as if he had secured it on purpose. “Finished.” Standing, he pulled his cigar from his mouth, knocked off the ash, and pointed to the wound. “Plug it,” he ordered.
    The dresser packed the wound open with linens soaked in chlorine. A farmer’s wife, a friend of Franklin’s mother in Missouri, had told him this cleaned the sores of her twelve children, so he used it in the dressings of all his patients.
    Patrick’s lower leg was wrapped first with linen,