On the morning of April 6, 1862, Albert Sidney Johnston, a Confederate General, poured in with 4000 soldiers to launch a surprise attack on the Union forces near the Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. The unprepared Union soldiers under Ulysses S. Grant, although outnumbered, made their stand at the sunken road called Hornet's Beast. General Don Carlos Buell arrived the following day with heavy Union reinforcements, and Confederate General Johnston was killed by a stray bullet. Johnston's leadership was replaced by P. G. T Beauregard, but by April 7, Grant's army drove the Confederates to Corinth.
The war, however, was a fatal loss to either side. A total of 23,746 soldiers had been victimized in the battlefield of Shiloh, out of which 13,047 were Union men and the rest Confederates. Such a huge number of victims within a span of a mere couple of days increased pressure on the medics, who were sluggish in their task of providing relief.
Meanwhile, war casualties noticed a strange phenomenon. Those days, bullets and cannons weren't the only issue. Harmful microbes infested the wounds of the already incapacitated soldiers, whose body immunity system wasn't strong enough to counter them. The knowledge of medicine wasn't really advanced, so army doctors weren't much help. But, as some casualties lay in the muddy, rain-flooded fields for two days awaiting the arrival of the medics, they noticed that their wounds had begun to emit a faint blue glow.
Even more surprisingly, as the wounded were moved to hospitals for treatment, doctors found that those men whose wounds glowed blue were healed faster than the others. The incident was immediately declared a divine miracle, it was now called the "Angel's Glow".
The Angel's Glow of Shiloh would have remained a mystery, but in 2001, Bill Martin, whose mother is a microbiologist by profession, partnered with John Curtis to work on this Civil war mystery as a part of their science project for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. And they found a solution. It was a bacterium called Photorhabdus Luminescens.
The Photorhabdus Luminescens live in the guts of parasitic worms called nematodes. In this biological partnership, the nematodes burrow into the bodies of insect larvae and occupy their blood vessels. They then vomit out the Photorhabdus Luminescens from their guts. The bacterium, which is luminescent by nature, emits a faint blue glow. It releases certain chemicals which kill other microbes in the region, making it free for themselves and the nematodes to feed on.
Although the Photorhabdus Luminescens can't generally survive in the human body due to its high body temperature, the weak and hypothermic bodies of the soldiers, combined with the dampness and cold of the surrounding swamps, promoted their growth. They entered their body through the wounds, and released their antibiotic chemicals, which killed other harmful microbes, making the healing easier.
Thus, it turned out, what soldiers attributed to the work of divine angels, was merely a bacterial phenomenon. But that it has a scientific explanation doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't divine intervention. God works in mysterious ways, as they say. What do you think?
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