We Hold These Truths To Be Self...OH MY GOD! LOOK AT HIS LEG!!!

So I’m watching the John Adams HBO miniseries today, and like almost everything HBO does it’s great. It’s connecting people, places, and times for me in a way that books never have. For example, it never entered the transom of my mind that Samuel Adams and John Adams were related. I knew they were both prominent members of the revolution. I knew they were both from Boston. I knew that gene pools weren’t deep in the 18th century, but when John calls Samuel cousin I asked myself, “Is that THE Samuel Adams?” Then I mentally smacked myself in the back of the head. The series is also showing that the Founding Fathers, at least the ones from Massachusetts, were just a bunch of thugs. An English official calls John Hancock a smuggler, and the gentleman with the affinity for large font incites a riot and has the official stripped, tarred, and feathered by the mob. The scene is graphic. This probably should have prepared me for the battle scene when the ship carrying John Adams to France is attacked by a British ship. A lieutenant on Adams’s ship has his leg mangled by a cannon that was fired without having its brake set. Adams tries to help the guy by dragging him below deck to what I guess was a sick bay. All I could think about was the lieutenant’s destroyed leg bouncing down the steps. They hoist him onto a table, tie a tourniquet above his knee, tell him to drink as much rum as he can, they give him a leather strip to bite down on, and start sawing his leg off with a hacksaw. The damn thing had a serrated blade! The “doctor” seemed surprised when he hit an artery and blood started spattering the wall. Then he got annoyed with Adams because Adams wasn’t checking the lieutenant’s pulse quickly enough. As if checking someone’s pulse will stop blood from squirting out of a severed artery. With weapons more lethal than ever, drugs that actually relieve pain, and doctors that know to watch out for arteries when they attack large limbs with hacksaws, I would still be hesitant to engage in potentially lethal combat. But people that fought in wars throughout history seemed to not know or not care about what was going to happen to them. I guess when you’re 25 and your life expectancy is 30 you can’t be anything but phlegmatic about danger – better to bleed to death quickly on a table than die slowly from small pox, scurvy, rickets, syphilis, malaria, salmonella, trichinosis, thirst, hunger, or gangrene.