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Imagine going to the doctor and watching him pull one of these tools out of his bag….

Medicine has come a long way since the Texas Revolution, when doctors didn’t know that germs caused disease or infection, and many of their “cures” did more harm than good.

In his memoirs, Dr. Nicholas Labadie, surgeon to the Second Regiment of Texas Volunteers, paints a harrowing picture of medical treatment during the Battle of San Jacinto.

On April 20, during the cavalry skirmish, twenty-year-old Olwyn Trask was helping to move the Texian cannons when he was shot in the right thigh, shattering the bone. Army doctors disagreed about whether he had been hit by grapeshot from the Mexican cannon or a musket ball, and in an attempt to determine what had caused the injury, Dr. Labadie and two other Texian doctors probed the wound with their bare, unwashed fingers.

Unsurprisingly, Trask’s wound became infected. Dr. Labadie believed (correctly, an autopsy later showed) that the bullet was still lodged in Trask’s leg and recommended amputation—a very risky procedure in the 1830s—but he was overruled, and Trask eventually died in late May from the injury.