Is it possible that a woman could become pregnant, not by the usual means, but via a bullet?
Back in 1874 a publication known as ‘The American Medical Weekly’ ran an article by a Dr. LeGrand Capers who claimed that he witnessed just such a pregnancy.
During the American Civil War there was, so he said, a house which was very close to the Confederate lines.
According to Capers, a bullet hit a soldier, ‘carrying away the left testicle’, before continuing along it’s path into the house.
At the same time, coincidentally, one of the daughters of the house was struck by a stray bullet which hit her somewhere in the abdominal cavity.
As Capers was stationed with the army nearby he was able to check on the wounded girl several times over the next few months.
Around 6 months later he found that the girl was pregnant and a few months after that she gave birth to a baby boy who weighed in at 9 lbs.
Being 1874, the girl’s family were extremely embarrassed by the fact that their unmarried daughter had had a child, even though she declared that she had never had sex.
Doctor Capers duly examined the girl and was able to confirm that she was indeed a virgin.
Shortly after his birth the baby boy was taken ill and he had a large amount of swelling around his groin.
When the doctor operated he pulled out a bullet!
From that he deduced that the bullet must have acquired an amount of semen from the soldier’s testicle which had then managed to impregnate the girl when it buried itself inside of her stomach.
The story then continues to say that the girl wound up marrying the soldier and that they went on to have another 2 children.
However…
Dr. Capers had, in reality, made the entire tale up in order to poke fun at some of the more ridiculous medical stories that were emanating from the battlefields in those days.
Of course that small detail was of little consequence as the story was believed and was even re-told in the New York State Journal of Medicine in 1959.
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{ 4 comments }
The doctor sounds like he had a wicked sense of humor
Yeah, you would have liked him!
I thought this was going to be an April Fool joke until I saw you declare it as a hoax.
Do you think I would try and April fool you guys?
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