Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark

[Stauffenberg]

Something I came across of interest--the reporting by CSA soldiers after the main Shiloh battle that their wounds "glowed." Apparently caused by a type of luminescent bacteria, it seems this had a beneficial effect in that it was relatively benign to the human organism, but killed off many other hostile forms of bacteria present:

"Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.”

In 2001, almost one hundred and forty years after the battle, seventeen-year-old Bill Martin was visiting the Shiloh battlefield with his family. When he heard about the glowing wounds, he asked his mom – a microbiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service who had studied luminescent bacteria that lived in soil – about it."

Read the full text here: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/122477#ixzz1rGutG1LV

[WildCat]

How fascinating! I'd never heard of that before. Thank you for posting up the link.