Claim:  A woman became pregnant from being struck by a bullet that had passed through the scrotum of a Civil War soldier.
Verdict: REFUTES

Retrieved passages:
title: Legrand G. Capers
text: and "American Medical Weekly". The infamous case of "bullet pregnancy" was published in 1874 in The American Medical Weekly. Capers claimed that he witnessed this case eleven years before, while serving in the Confederate army: On the 12th day of May, 1863, the battle of R. was fought. [...] Our men were fighting nobly, but pressed by superior numbers, had gradually fallen back to within one hundred and fifty yards of the house. My position being near my regiment, suddenly I beheld a noble, gallant young friend staggering closer, and then fall to the earth. In the same moment a

title: Luisa Guidotti Mistrali
text: a checkpoint at which point bursts of gunfire from machine guns came from both sides of the road from two soldiers which struck her: it severed her femoral artery and caused her to die from excessive bleeding. Guidotti was going from the hospital to the pregnant woman's home when she was forced to stop at a checkpoint. Soldiers were there since one of their own had been shot dead there. Guidotti saw no road blocks so waited and then thought she could leave so drove off and turned right to get to the woman's home. It was then that the

title: Gianna Beretta Molla
text: pain had disappeared with the doctors amazed at the fact that the fistula had healed in full. The miracle that led to her canonization involved Elizabeth Comparini who was sixteen weeks pregnant in 2003 from Franca in Brazil and sustained a tear in her placenta that drained her womb of all amniotic fluid. Comparini's doctors told her that the child's chance of survival was nil due to the weeks left prior to birth. Comparini said she appealed to the then-Blessed asking for her intercession and was able to deliver her child in perfect health despite the lack of amniotic fluid.

title: Firearm ownership law in China
text: hospital. It was supposed that the bullet had pierced the upper part of his lungs. Another instance occurred seven days after the French landing, when a Chinese walked into the hospital with his skull wounded and the brain visible. Several others, shot through the thighs and arms, bones being splintered in many pieces, bore their pain most heroically. Soon after the engagement, when there were seventy men in the hospital, some being badly wounded with as many as three shots apiece, there was scarcely a groan to be heard. One of the wounded came to the hospital after having had

title: Contemporary reaction to Ignaz Semmelweis
text: her ward. In this way the other patients were exposed and nearly all the patients in that room died. […] The ichorous particles that saturated the air of the maternity ward penetrated the uteruses already lacerated in the birth process. The particles were resorbed, and childbed fever resulted. Even with the most meticulous chlorine-washings there seemed to be an unavoidable mortality rate of about 1 percent. He therefore suggested that self-infection took place - that internally generated cadaveric particles were responsible, for instance tissue crushed in the birth process and eventually turning gangrenous. Most of the objections from Semmelweis's critics

title: Emory and Henry College Hospital
text: the Civil War. Silas Sims, a member of the 4th Kentucky (CSA) Cavalry, came upon a dead Federal Officer who had been struck by an artillery shell in the head. He then proceeded to reach into his haversack and grab some granulated salt. He then poured the salt from his hand into the open skull proclaiming: "There, you came for some salt, now take some." The atrocities against the Federal dead and dying continued throughout the night. Confederate soldiers took a special spite in killing the Negroes that had been injured on the field. George W. Carter noted: "After the

title: Legrand G. Capers
text: piercing scream from the house reached my ear! I was soon by the side of the young man, and, upon examination, found a compound fracture, with extensive comminution of the left tibia; the ball having ricochetted from these parts, and, in its onward flight, passed through the scrotum, carrying away the left testicle. Scarcely had I finished dressing the wounds of this poor fellow, when the estimable matron came running to me in the greatest distress, begging me to go to one of her daughters, who, she informed me, had been badly wounded a few minutes before. Hastening to the

title: Son of a gun
text: declared he literally was thus cradled, under the breast of a gun-carriage." Alternatively, historian Brian Downing proposes that the phrase "son of a gun" originated from feudal knights' disdain for newly developed firearms and those who wielded them. An American urban myth also proposes that the saying originated in a story reported in the October 7, 1864 "The American Medical Weekly" about a woman impregnated by a bullet that went through a soldier's scrotum and into her abdomen. The story about the woman was a joke written by Dr. Legrand G. Capers; some people who read the weekly failed to

title: Kunan Poshpora incident
text: had given birth to a child with a fractured arm just four days later. The investigative committee interviewed the hospital officials and concluded that injuries like this may happen due to the efforts of doctors, who are trying to position the unborn fetus for a delivery. On March 15 and 21, Medical examinations were conducted on 32 of the women, confirmed presence of abrasions on their chests and abdomens, and three of the unmarried women had torn hymens. The team concluded that "such a delayed medical examination proves nothing" and that such abrasions are commonly found among villagers in Kashmir.

title: Vyckie Garrison
text: at home, without attendance by a medical professional, but her uterus partially ruptured during labour, almost killing her. Her doctor advised her that her life would be in danger if she continued to conceive, but her friends in the Quiverfull movement said otherwise: "I was told that a woman shouldn't shrink back from supposed dangers and that we should honour God with our bodies," she says. "Jesus died for us, we should be willing to die for him." She became pregnant twice more, suffering two miscarriages. Garrison asserts that her then-husband beat and emotionally bullied their children. "I started seeing

title: Jordan–Israel Mixed Armistice Commission
text: blown in. “He had grabbed a rifle and told his wife to take their daughter and rush to the main part of the village for safety. The wife, who was eight-months pregnant, moved cautiously to follow his orders. She had taken only a few steps from the back door when the Israelis, who were firing from behind a stone wall, turned their fire in her direction. The bullet that passed through her body from the back snuffed out the life she was carrying, but her own life was miraculously spared.” The third house targeted contained the bodies of a mother

title: Gianna Beretta Molla
text: fourth and final pregnancy – Molla developed a fibroma on her uterus. The doctors gave her three choices following an examination: an abortion or a complete hysterectomy or the removal of the fibroma alone. The Church forbade all direct abortion but teachings on the principle of double effect would have allowed her to undergo the hysterectomy which would have caused her unborn child's death as an unintended consequence. Molla opted for the removal of the fibroma since she wanted to preserve her child's life; she told the doctors that her child's life was more important than her own. On the

title: Charlotte Hatfield
text: the battle she was injured after her horse was shot from beneath her. She also sustained a gunshot wound to the leg and a cut on the shoulder. She was brought to a Confederate hospital to be treated when the doctor, Jesse Terry, realized that Private Hatfield was actually a woman. She convinced Terry to keep it a secret, and as rebel field hospitals were temporary, especially on battlefields where the Confederates lost, she was subsequently transported under either a parole or humanitarian pass to the US Army hospital at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas where she completed her recovery. Charley later

title: Single-bullet theory
text: rises above the clavicle, and noted that although the apex of the right lung and the parietal pleural membrane over it had been bruised, they were not penetrated. The report also noted that the thoracic cavity was not penetrated. The concluding page of the Bethesda autopsy report states: "The other missile [referring to the body-penetrating bullet] entered the right superior posterior thorax above the scapula, and traversed the soft tissues of the supra-scapular and the supra-clavicular portions of the base of the right side of the neck. This missile produced contusions of the right apical parietal pleura and of the

title: Brookfield, Massachusetts
text: pregnant when executed. Newspapers described the case as "the most extraordinary crime ever perpetrated in New England." Bathsheba was the mother of three young children, and in her own words felt "an utter aversion" for her husband, who was known to be an abusive drunk. A year before the murder, she took in and nursed a sixteen-year-old Continental soldier who was returning from a year's enlistment under George Washington. The two became lovers and conceived a child. Divorces were all but impossible for women at that time, and adulteresses were stripped to the waist and publicly whipped. Bathsheba's pregnancy occasioned

title: John F. Reynolds
text: 19th Indiana), and the source of the bullet (a Confederate infantryman, a Confederate sharpshooter, or friendly fire). One primary source was Sergeant Charles Henry Veil, his orderly and unit Color Guard, who described the events in a letter in 1864 and then contradicted some of the details in another letter 45 years later. A letter from Reynolds' sister, Jennie, stated that the wound had a downward trajectory from the neck, implying that he was shot from above, presumably a sharpshooter in a tree or barn. Historians Bruce Catton and Glenn Tucker make firm assertions that a sharpshooter was responsible; Stephen

title: South African criminal law
text: disconnected the respirator. They were merely ending a fruitless attempt to save her life. Williams’s conviction was therefore upheld. In "S v Counter", the appellant had shot the deceased, lodging a bullet in her buttock. Unbeknownst either to her or to her doctors, the bullet had penetrated her anal canal, causing virulent septicaemia and leading to the pneumonia from which, two weeks later, she died. It fell to the SCA to decide whether it was the shot fired or rather medical negligence which had caused her death: The sequence of events from the time of the deceased's admission until her

title: Malingering
text: consequence" and suggests feigning a "dry dropsy [...] of some such other secret disease, as the common conversant can hardly discover, and the physician either not speedily heal, or not honestly bewray." Lady Flora Hastings was accused of adultery stemming from court gossip following abdominal pain. Because she refused to be physically examined by a man for reasons of modesty befitting a lady in her position, the physician assumed her to be pregnant. She later died of stomach cancer. General George S. Patton, in what became known as 'the Greek Incident', found a soldier in a field hospital but with

title: Charlie Storms
text: that time he was on his back." He found two thicknesses of silk wrapped around the bullet and two tears where it had struck the vertebral column. Examining Storms afterward, Goodfellow found that he had been shot in the heart, but was surprised to see "not a drop of blood" exiting the wound. He discovered that the bullet had ripped through the man's clothes and into a folded silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He extracted the intact bullet from the wound with the silk wrapped around it. As a result of what he learned, Goodfellow began experimenting with the

title: Pregnancy from rape
text: rape have been killed by their mothers at various times in history. During ancient and medieval times, such infanticide was not prohibited (however, penance was expected of these mothers in medieval Europe). In contrast to the modern scientific consensus that rape-induced pregnancies are no less likely than any other, beliefs that rape could not lead to pregnancy were widespread in both legal and medical opinion for centuries. Galen, an ancient Greek physician, believed that a woman must experience pleasure to release "seed" and become pregnant, and could not derive such pleasure from nonconsensual sex. Galen's thinking influenced understanding from medieval