SHARPSBURG, Md. -- On the single bloodiest day in American history, military doctors worked hellishly to save Union and Confederate lives with the most advanced technology they had: the bone saw.
So many arms and legs were removed at the Battle of Antietam that big-city newspapers caricatured the average military surgeon as Dr. Sawbones and the Army of the Potomac's chief battlefield surgeon instituted reforms to ensure that amputations were not performed unnecessarily.
And yet, the surgeons probably did not amputate enough limbs, said George Wunderlich, executive director of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick.
Wunderlich, citing accounts from a British military observer and the Union's chief battlefield surgeon, suggested that a shortage of chloroform, used as a general anesthetic, hindered the ability to perform surgery. Soldiers who might have survived, minus a limb, instead died of infections, he said.
These accounts, along with exhibits of Civil War-era medical equipment, are on display at the new Pry House Field Hospital Museum at Antietam National Battlefield. The museum, which is owned by the National Park Service and leased to Frederick's Civil War medicine museum, opened April 28. The site includes the Pry farmhouse, built in 1844 from bricks fired on the banks of Antietam Creek, and a barn that became a hospital ward for soldiers.
Much of Antietam's history has become almost legendary: the carnage, unsurpassed by either Pearl Harbor or Sept. 11, 2001, that halted Gen. Robert E. Lee's first try at invading the North; the Union's serendipitous discovery of Lee's plans on a piece of paper wrapped around some cigars; and Union Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan's frustrating inability to crush Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, even with the rebels' backs pinned to the Potomac River.
But the new museum takes an unusual view, intended to shed more light on medical practices of the time.
For example, three-fourths of all operations were amputations, and all but about 10 percent -- contrary to Hollywood's depiction of people biting on bullets -- were done with anesthetic, Wunderlich said. And more of the work focused on treating disease, such as dysentery and typhoid, than tending to wounds.
Blood ran freely on Sept. 17, 1862, when one group of Americans dressed in blue and another clad in gray clashed in the cornfields and country lanes near a small German sect's whitewashed church in Western Maryland. The Pry farm offered a spectacular view of the action.
"You would have seen three different scenes," Wunderlich said.
From the farmhouse, for example, McClellan oversaw the battle, the museum's panels explain. A visitor that day might have observed Union mapmakers, adjutants, orderlies and junior officers working out the business of dispatching orders and receiving reports. Some staff officers lugged the Prys' upholstered furniture up the knoll directly behind the house to view the battle unfolding, Wunderlich said. Though somewhat obscured now by trees, the panorama still includes Bloody Lane and Miller Cornfield, a lush green field cut to stubble by the opening volleys of the battle.
"The second scene, you would have seen Dr. Jonathan Letterman's staff. They would have been doing something completely different," Wunderlich said: rounding up medical supplies from Baltimore to Frederick and supervising the ambulances deployed in the fields around the farmhouse. Staff members also set up the hospitals that soon filled with soldiers.
It was from the Pry house that McClellan directed the battle. Union Maj. Gen. Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker underwent surgery on an injured foot in the house, a scene re-created at the sparse museum. It's also where President Abraham Lincoln stopped to pay his respects to Maj. Gen. Israel Bush Richardson, who was gravely wounded by golf-ball-size shot fired by Confederate forces. Lincoln also had come to view the battlefield and meet with McClellan in an attempt to rouse the ever-reluctant general to pursue the Confederates more aggressively.
The house also illustrates the economic toll on civilians. Before the battle, Philip and Elizabeth Cost Pry operated a prosperous farm. The battle nearly destroyed them financially.
Wunderlich said Pry submitted his damage claim to the U.S. government -- including seven large hogs at $7 each, five barrels of flour at $7 each, 900 bushels of corn at 50 cents a bushel and 8,074 pieces of timber from his "worm rail" fence. He did not receive any compensation until the late 1870s.
The Pry House Field Hospital Museum at 18906 Shepherdstown Pike between Sharpsburg and Keedysville will be open from April to early December, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays.
