Preacherman
Member
I know that the story below is an urban legend (see http://www.snopes.com/pregnant/bullet.asp for full details of how it started), but the article is so well written that I couldn't resist posting it. How about this as a conversation-starter at the gun club? 
From the Kingsport Times-News (http://www.timesnews.net/communityArticle.dna?_StoryID=3599143):
For those who want the straight dope, Snopes debunks the article as follows (follow the link to their site for more details):
From the Kingsport Times-News (http://www.timesnews.net/communityArticle.dna?_StoryID=3599143):
Battlefield conception leads to real son of a gun
Sunday, February 12, 2006
By GENE OWENS
Columnist
This is a story of love forged on a battlefield of the War Between the States - unconsummated love that nevertheless led to the birth of a youngster who can only be styled a son of a gun.
The story would be hard to believe were it not about a heroic Confederate soldier of unsullied honor (as were all Southern soldiers) and a Southern damsel of unassailable virtue (as were all Southern damsels). It came to me in the mail from a friend in Jamestown, N.C., who has been the source of a lot of unbelievable stuff in this column. The yarn was labeled "The Minie Ball Pregnancy" in a publication copyrighted in 1994 by Gordon A. Cotton.
Cotton's impeccable source was an article first published in the Nov. 7, 1874, edition of The American Medical Weekly in Louisville, Ky. It was written by L.G. Capers, M.D., a native of Charleston, S.C., who was Stonewall Jackson's personal staff surgeon. That Stonewall died of complications from an arm wound should not be held against Dr. Capers. The Confederate Army had no M*A*S*H units and the Yankees denied Confederate surgeons the use of Walter Reed. Even if Walter Reed had been available, the Confederacy was short on choppers to airlift the general from Chancellorsville.
Dr. Capers later became chief surgeon for Cuttshaw's Battery during the Vicksburg Campaign of 1863. On May 12 of that year, he was in Raymond, Miss., just south of the Natchez Trace between Jackson and Vicksburg, when a Confederate brigade clashed with the advancing forces of Ulysses S. Grant.
About 300 yards behind the surgeon's regiment stood a "fine residence" occupied by a matron and her two teenage daughters. As the outnumbered Southrons manfully contested the Yankee advance, the three women stood in front of their home, ready to rip their petticoats into bandages at the first sign of Southern blood spilt on the field of valor.
As Dr. Capers observed the fray, he saw a gallant, noble figure in gray stagger toward him, then collapse on the ground. Before the women had time to slip into something surgical, he heard a piercing scream from the direction of the house.
Dr. Capers examined the young soldier and found that a minie ball had pierced his tibia, which is a big bone in the leg. It ricocheted through his flesh and bones, and exited in his groin area, carrying with it a critical part of his anatomy that contained a portion of his potential posterity.
The good surgeon was patching up the young man as best he could before giving his attention to the source of the piercing scream behind him. The matron came running up to inform him that her eldest daughter was gravely wounded. The doctor examined the daughter and found that a minie ball had torn into her tummy. He treated her as best he could, but figured she wouldn't survive.
But survive she did, and when he revisited the town several months later he found her "in excellent health and spirits," except that "her abdomen had become enormously enlarged, so much as to resemble pregnancy the seventh or eighth month."
The doctor, of course, dismissed the possibility of pregnancy, since the young woman was a maiden from a family of spotless repute and the physical evidence indicated that she had never done anything that might bring on pregnancy. Nevertheless, 278 days from the date of her wounding, the girl delivered a nine-pound boy.
A few weeks later, the young mother summoned the doctor to report something seriously wrong in the infant's groin area. His examination showed a "hard, roughened substance, evidently foreign." The surgeon promptly operated and removed from the child's privates a minie ball, "mashed and battered as if it had met in its flight some hard, unyielding substance," such as maybe the tibia of a healthy Rebel soldier.
It took many sleepless nights for the doctor to figure it out, but finally he came up with the only possible explanation: The minie ball had picked up seeds of life as it passed through the young man's groin. Then it struck the young lady, carrying the seed through her ovary and into her womb, thus putting her in a family way.
"There can be no other solution of the phenomenon," asserted Dr. Capers.
Modern ob-gyns may dispute his conclusion, but they are undoubtedly unfamiliar with both the Southern code of honor and 19th century anatomy. Others may ask for a more scientific explanation for how a minie ball could impregnate a young woman, then become enmeshed in the undifferentiated cells of an embryo smaller than itself in just the right position to be capsuled in the child's future reproductive organs.
True, this would be impossible in the scientific 21st century, but in the more primitive environment of the 19th century, it sounds about right.
The yarn has a storybook ending: The doctor found the young soldier who had been wounded and told him what he suspected. The soldier visited the young woman. Love flashed like a minie ball out of a musket barrel. We don't know whether the lad bought the story, but he did marry the girl, and they lived happily ever after, producing three children in all, but none resembling the young soldier as closely as did the firstborn.
If the wounded man had been a dastardly Yankee and the young woman a camp follower of the Union army, I could think of many more likely explanations for the pregnancy. But since both soldier and damsel represented the flower of Southern virtue, I have to agree: The young woman did become pregnant by a minie ball, and the child was a true son of a gun.
For those who want the straight dope, Snopes debunks the article as follows (follow the link to their site for more details):
Claim: During the Civil War, a woman was impregnated by sperm carried on a bullet that passed through the scrotum of a soldier and penetrated her ovaries.
Status: False.
Origins: Sometimes touted as the origin of the phrase "son of a gun," the apocryphal tale of "the bullet through the balls" is a well-traveled legend, often reported by such infamous urban legend vectors as "Dear Abby," as in this example from her 6 November 1982 column:
It seems that during the Civil War (May 12, 1863, to be exact), a young Virginia farm girl was standing on her front porch while a battle was raging nearby. A stray bullet first passed through the scrotum of a young Union cavalryman, then lodged in the reproductive tract of the young woman, who thus became pregnant by a man she had not been within 100 feet of! And nine months later she gave birth to a healthy baby!
The story, in fact, is completely false. The claim for the miraculous "bullet pregnancy" originated with an article that was printed as a joke in the journal The American Medical Weekly on 7 November 1874. Son of a gun! Subsequent journals and books cited the article as fact without checking the original source or realizing that it was a put-on, and the story has been passed down through the years as an "actual case that appeared in a real medical journal many years ago."
The long and tortuous history of this legend begins with an article entitled "ATTENTION GYNAECOLOGISTS! — NOTES FROM THE DIARY OF A FIELD AND HOSPITAL SURGEON, C.S.A." appearing under the name of an "L.G. Capers, M.D., Vicksburg, Miss." in the 7 November 1874 issue of The American Medical Weekly. It recounts the now-familiar story of a Confederate field surgeon who dressed the wound of a soldier injured by a bullet that had entered the soldier's leg, ricocheted off the bone, and carried away his left testicle. Coincidentally, the same surgeon was then called upon a few moments later to administer aid to a young lady who had received a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Exactly 278 days later, the surgeon returned to the village and delivered a baby boy of the wounded women, although she steadfastly maintained that she was still a virgin.
The general tone and style of the article should have indicated to the astute reader that the whole thing was a gag. Even if they didn't, at least a few more obvious clues gave away the joke: The baby was said to have been born "with something wrong about the genitals," and upon examination the surgeon discovered that the ball which had wounded the soldier and impregnated the woman was lodged in the newborn infant's scrotum! Even more implausibly, the soldier, when told of his astonishingly-achieved fatherhood, quickly wed the child's mother! For those who still didn't catch on to the article's facetiousness, a note from the editor explaining that the whole thing was a bit of "fun" (complete with a pun on the putative author's name) was printed in the same journal two weeks later.
(Note: The details of battle given in the original article do correspond to actual events. In May of 1863, Union troops under the command of Major General James B. McPherson set out for Raymond, Mississippi, a town about fifteen miles from Jackson, the state capital. On May 12 a unit led by Major General John A. Logan ran into a Confederate brigade under the command of General John Gregg, and the battle of Raymond ensued, with Gregg eventually withdrawing his outnumbered forces from Raymond and heading down the road to Jackson.)
Several months later, the British medical journal The Lancet reprinted (portions of) the 1874 article. Then, in 1896, George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle cited (and quoted from) The Lancet as a footnote to a section about artificial impregnation in their book Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine. Even Gould and Pyle seem to have recognized the original article's drollery, however, as they mention that it is included "not because it bears any semblance of possibility, but as a curious example from the realms of imagination in medicine." F. Donald Napolitani, M.D., evidently didn't catch the article's whimsicality, though, as he presented all the same details as an "authenticated case report" in his 1959 article about "Two Unusual Cases of Gunshot Wounds of the Uterus" for the New York State Journal of Medicine.
From then on, one or more of these sources has been cited as proof of an actual occurrence "carefully recorded for the annals of medicine" in everything from American Heritage magazine to "Dear Abby," with each source accepting the previous ones' references as accurate citations of a "real" medical journal article.
Gunfire never.
