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Union nurse Mary Edmonds is just cutting off random soldiers’ legs out of boredom now.
“They should not have given me this bone saw,” said Edmonds when questioned about the above-expected number of amputees in her care. “These guys made a mistake coming into the medical tent. I think our side is doing pretty well? We’re the blue ones, right? I don’t know, I don’t ask. But nobody seems to need their legs systematically removed anymore. Scarce as hens’ teeth. I’m bored as hell.”
“I’m not a pussyfooted, high-falutin’ floozy,” she continued, putting down the very dull bone saw, washing her hands of a concerning amount of blood, and grabbing from a rapidly depleting supply of tourniquets and gauze. “I’m a well-oiled nursing machine, and I’m done combing hair for lice and treating ‘trench foot,’ whatever the fuck that is. I was trained for one thing only, and that is swiftly removing legs, cinching off the major arteries, and wrapping the remaining limb in gauze before gangrene sets in.”
“Oh, this guy? He came in because he got stung by a wasp,” Edmonds added, carefully tending to the major wounds that she alone inflicted on a young soldier. “I don’t have any way to fix wasp stings. But I do have a way to fix the number of legs this guy had, which was two legs too many.”
At press time, Confederate nurse Georgia Hawkins was just sort of throwing leeches at anyone with a pulse.
