Exhibit Reveals Curious, Gruesome Civil War Medicine
By DON OLDENBURG
The Washington Post
LINTHICUM, Md. (AP) - At a cocktail reception to open "Civil War Medicine," a new exhibit at the ever-so-curious William P. Didusch Center for Urologic History, located in the Baltimore suburbs, onlookers quietly groan as a Civil War surgeon tosses a Union soldier's amputated arm into the piles of bloody body parts littering the floor.
Next, the doctor picks up a long, curved, silver instrument designed for very personal probing, and some of the men among the party guests get a woozy rush.
Robert Urban is demonstrating battlefield surgeries in the lobby of the American Urological Association headquarters in Linthicum in late June.
The soldier, a corpse-like dummy attired in a Union blue uniform, lies in a field hospital mock-up of the 23rd Pennsylvania Infantry. Wounded in the belly, he "can't go to the bathroom," says the goateed Urban, who isn't a real doctor - he just plays one in battlefield reenactments.
http://www.wtop.com/index.php?nid=25&sid=543124