Angel's Glow - WHAT!?

Em
Nov 6, 2019
4 min read

As many of you know, I am usually fairly focused on Canadian History. However, this week I read an article about something that I found so intriguing that I had to do some research and write this week’s blog about it.

Aren’t you all so curious?

What could possible have grabbed Emma’s attention?

Will she ever tell us?

Why is she still asking questions?

This is the worst.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, lords and ladies, allow me to introduce you to this week’s topic:

GLOW-IN-THE-DARK CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS!

No seriously…

I promise.

Well, it wasn’t the entire soldier that was glow-in-the-dark, it was just their wounds. I know, you still don’t believe me. Just sit back and let me tell you about it. I guarantee you will be as engrossed as I was.

This glow-in-the-dark phenomenon was nicknamed ‘Angel's Glow’. It was noticed after the Battle of Shiloh (also known as the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing) on April 6-7, 1862. The battle of Shiloh was one of the bloodiest of the war with the causalities from each side equaling close to 23 000 men.

Before I go any further, I want to take a minute to let that truly sink in, 23 000 men. Two days of fighting and 23 000 causalities. With November 11 quickly approaching it is imperative we take a minute to actually let that staggering number ruminate.

I am not going to go into the details of the battle itself but there are plenty of excellent resources online if you care to look into what happened during the Battle of Shiloh. What is important to this post is that we talk about the conditions of the battlefield.

The battlefield at the Battle of Shiloh was swampy, muddy, rainy and overall pretty disgusting. Sadly, because of the massive amount of carnage neither army was set up medically to deal with the staggering numbers of wounded and dying soldiers. It took two full days and nights before all the wounded were cleared from the battlefield. The men lay there in the mud and foul water, trying to drag themselves to safety or, for those who couldn’t, lying there waiting for help to come. To add insult to this miserable and torturous event it rained during the first night. Now here is where the story gets really odd…Many of the soldiers lying wounded in the field noticed that their wounds were starting to emit a greenish-blue glowing light.

I’m sorry, one more time for those in the back.

Their wounds were glowing in the dark!

Stranger still, as the men were brought off the field and treated medically the soldiers who reported seeing their wounds glowing recovered better than the soldiers who did not. The glowing wounds seem to heal quicker, get less infections, even heal more cleanly with less horrendous scarring. This is why it was called Angel’s Glow, because if you were lucky enough to experience this luminescence you seemed to be touched/protected in some way by angels or a higher power.

Can we just close our eyes for a moment, actually you are reading this so don’t close your eyes but imagine you are wounded in the leg, you know that it is likely that your leg will either be removed when you finally get to a medical tent OR you will get gangrene and the infection will kill you. You are scared, you are alone in the cold and wet, and now YOUR WOUND STARTS TO EMIT A STRANGE BLUE LIGHT… Excuse me? What do you even say to that? You turn your head to look around and you see that other wounded men have the same glow?

Soldier 1: Hey Silas! You awake over there, or alive?!

Soldier 2: I am alive, last time I checked.

Solider 1: Happy to hear it. So, my leg is lighting up like a bonfire over here!

Soldier 2: God Damn Henry, my arm is glowing too!

Soldier 1: Shit, are we dead then?

Soldier 2: Nah, I’m too cold to be dead.

Soldier 1: Well I’ll be… Let’s just wait this out.

Soldier 2: Sounds good to me, Henry.

All the characters and dialogue are fictitious, as far as I know. Seriously though, what would you even think if that was happening to you?

For 140 years this remained a folktale and mystery of the Civil War. The doctors and soldiers at the time had no explanation for it.

Are you ready for the story to get even crazier!!

In 2001, a 17-year-old high school student Bill Martin, with the help of his friend Jonathon Curtis and Bill’s mother Phyllis (who was a microbiologist) solved this century old riddle for his science fair project! The boys research studied both the historical aspects of the battle as well as the science of the battlefield. They found out that the battlefield soil was a perfect breeding ground for a bacterium called Photorhabdus luminescens. The boys put P. luminescens in a petri dish with other infectious bacteria. They saw that the P. luminescens was actually destroying the other bacteria. So, although it is an infectious bacterium, it is not that hazardous to humans, it actually worked to help the save the soldiers from the more dangerous bacteria by cleaning the wounds.

The boys soon ran into a problem with their theory. The temperature required to foster and grow this glowing bacterium was way colder then the temperature of the human body. How could it have been the culprit for all these glowing wounds if it could not survive on the human body.

Enter historical research for the win…

Bill looked at the weather and conditions the evening of the battle when the glow was first noticed. It was early April in Tennessee and with the wet conditions, the temperatures at night dropped very low and some of the soldiers actually suffered from hypothermia. Wanting to further prove his case, the boys sat in the rain on a chilly day in Spring and then recorded the temperatures of their legs. Sure enough, the temperature of the boy’s legs would have allowed P. luminescens to survive, and the civil war soldiers would have been even colder than that.

Amazing right? Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

Photorhabdus luminescens