In the summer of 1844, Philadelphians rioted with an intensity beyond anything the city had endured for decades. A new political party – dedicated to restricting the rights of immigrants – sought to gain followers by staging mass rallies throughout Philadelphia County. When they gathered in the predominantly Irish-Catholic Third Ward of Kensington in May, they provoked a brawl that led to three days of gunfire and arson, as native-born Protestants fought Irish-born Catholics. After eight weeks of uneasy peace, the fighting resumed in July. This time, the volunteer militia intervened in defense of a Catholic church against a nativist mob. In both sets of clashes, Philadelphians fought with muskets, shotguns, and, eventually, cannon, scarring buildings and mangling bodies.
Summoned to the wounded, Philadelphia’s physicians and surgeons shared their neighbors’ horror at seeing their city reduced to a battlefield. Yet they also recognized a rare opportunity to test some of the new ideas about military surgery that had arrived from Europe. Bearing witness to the carnage, they recorded their observations in notes and, later, in print. By doing so, they left me – the historian – with the same challenge they had faced nearly two centuries before: how to respect the dignity of the wounded, while also making the most of the catastrophe?
The surgeons’ observations survive thanks to a remarkable document: an eleven-page published report presented by Dr. Isaac Parrish to the November 1844 meeting of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. While officially deploring “this dark page in our history,” Parrish – a 33-year-old surgeon of rising renown – seized the opportunity to enhance his colleagues’ knowledge of military surgery by describing each wound in loving detail.
Edward Lyon, Parrish reported, was shot as he waved the musket he had seized from a militia soldier. “The slug entered the front of the arm, passed through the axilla, inside of the vessels, (they being thrown out by the raised position of the arm) and was extracted outside of the external edge of the scapula. He died from absorption of pus, his lungs being covered with metastatic abscesses.”
Nathan Ramsey was shot in the chest. The ball “penetrated the upper portion of the right side of the thorax, near the edge of the sternum, and passing a short distance obliquely, entered the left thoracic cavity in front of the pericardium, and then passing directly backward, came out under the posterior edge of the left scapula.” Remarkably, Ramsey survived for three weeks, and Parrish half-regretted not observing him more carefully. The wound was so big that a doctor might have been able to watch Ramsey’s beating heart, “but it was not deemed prudent during life to inspect the interesting phenomena which must have been thus made evident.”