Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1877 — Remarkable Recoveries. [ARTICLE]

Remarkable Recoveries.

A Confederate soldier from the valley of Virginia., in one of the battles of the late civil war, was struck in the head by a minie ball. The ball passed through the skull, and the surgeons, afraid to probe the wound in search of it, left the man to die. In the course of time he recovered, but had lost his reason, and was sent to the insane asylum at Staunton, where ho remained for eleven years. At length Dr. Fauntelroy, an eminent physician of that city, obtained permission from the hospital authorities and friends of the insane man to make a surgical examination of the head, with the hope of finding the ball. He was successful, and found the ball imbedded on the inside of the skull and pushing against the brain. Unable to extract it with any instrument at hand, he took a chisel and mortised it out. As soon as the ball was removed reason resumed its control, and the deranged one was in his right mind. He says that he is not conscious of anything that occurred during the interval of eleven years. From the time he was struck on the battle-field to the moment the pressure was removed from the brained! was a blank to him. Another case, in the same county of Augusta, was that of a boy whose gun burst while shooting, and drove the lock into the brain. The piece was taken out by a skillful surgeon without serious injury to the patient. But the most remarkable case that I hear of was in the same neighborhood. It was that of a woman subject to fits of mental derangement, who while in a spell of lunacy drove an eight-penny nail into the top of her head, penetrating down into the brain—the nail having been driven up to its head. The nail was drawn out, and the woman has been in sound mental condition efer since.— Wheeling ( Va.) Register.