Description
Observations from Crimean and US Civil Wars remarked that more ‘disastrous’ wounds were marking the battlefield. The response was the birth of new techniques around trauma care and triage. Less well considered has been the development of wound ballistics, the study of the effects of weaponry on the body. Important for medical surgeons wishing to enhance treatment, equal effort was directed to devising experiments to test and maximize the ‘stopping power’ of weaponry. Focusing on early experimental testing and battle casualty surveys focused on the rapid development of the rifle’s conical bullets, I explore the search for the ‘militarily acceptable wound’. I argue that killing in and itself was an insufficient as a measure of death in war. Rather, killing had to be calibrated in specific ways. Death as a result came to have certain meanings: the type of wounds from particular rifles and bullets indicated not just how crossing the line from life to death was possible but permissible, a ‘convention’ of modern war. Transforming wounds from medical specimens into the materiel of war, I situate wounding as ‘martial tactic’ in which dead bodies are more than consequences but come to shape weapons. Overall, I contend that bullets and dead bodies together make up an ethical infrastructure through which certain deadly weapons become desirable.
