FIRST ACTIONS OF WOUNDED SOLDIERS. 161 



to respond. He thought that his head only was lifted from the 

 ground, and tried to speak, but could not. He recognized a fellow- 

 officer who passed at the moment, and remarked upon the accident. 

 Then he concluded that the battery had been fired, and that his 

 head had been shot off. This puzzled him, and he began to specu- 

 late upon the phenomenon of a head carrying on reasoning pro- 

 cesses while separated from the body. Was it not a mistake, after 

 all, to believe that the soul is located in the body ? Was not the 

 experience he was passing through proof that the seat of all con- 

 sciousness, will, and reason, and every spiritual attribute was in 

 the head ? (Helms was orthodox, and a remark from a skeptical 

 physician, some time before, to the effect that dissection revealed 

 no such an organ as the soul, had left a strong impression upon 

 his young mind. He was yet in his teens.) Metaphysical thoughts 

 were at length interrupted by a pricking and stinging sensation 

 in the neck, and gradually full consciousness and motor power 

 returned. He had been lifted and carried out of the reach of 

 balls, head and all intact. A bullet had hit the leather straps of 

 his haversack and canteen where they crossed his shoulders, cut- 

 ting two and stopping at the third, as they lay close to the neck. 

 (The flying ends of the severed straps caught his eye the moment 

 it was done.) The collar-bone was broken, and the large muscles 

 and tendons of the neck were badly bruised. Evidently there was 

 temporary paralysis caused by injury of certain nerves at the 

 neck, with but slight derangement of the functions of the organs 

 in the head, while the sensory functions of the body were cut off 

 from participation in sensations registered at the brain.* 



In contrast with Captain Helms's counterfeit is a case of 

 actual decapitation, noted vividly and vividly recalled by com- 

 rades of my regiment, particularly by one who was a careful and 

 sensitive observer, Captain A. H. De Graff, now an engineering ex- 

 pert. On the 17th of June, in the charge of the Ninth Corps on 

 the Confederate works east of Petersburg, a sergeant of the 

 Fifty-seventh Massachusetts leaped upon the parapet, and, with 

 his cap in his left hand and his musket in his right, stood cheer- 

 ing and gesturing with his arms to incite his comrades to come 

 on. Suddenly a shell took his head off as completely as a knife 

 could have done, but the tall form continued erect for some 

 seconds, the arms still waving frantically, but with ever-lessening 

 sweep and power, until the forces of the body collapsed, when the 

 headless trunk toppled over to the ground. f 



* Physiology assumes that complete separation may take place at the Deck and the 

 functions of the divided parts go on for a space. A head freshly guillotined gave back 

 mocking gestures of the mouth and eyes when a bystander made faces at it. 



f A swift bullet will pass through a pane of glass and not jar it enough to crack it. 

 The shell did its work without upsetting the body by the force of the blow. Dr. S. G, 



VOL. XLI. 14 



