One of the most cherished modern images of the Civil War is the wounded soldier with a chunk of wood between his teeth, waiting for the surgeon to saw off his leg. It makes for pretty great television, especially if you have an unrequited sadistic streak, but it's largely untrue.

According to research from Ohio State University, amputation was the most common battlefield surgery, not because bloodthirsty surgeons over-diagnosed the need for it, but because of the adorably-named "Minie ball" everyone was getting shot with. The Minie ball caused horrific injuries — if you were shot in the head or body, you died. If you were shot in the arms or legs, you got an amputation, and you might die anyway. The mortality rate for hip amputations was about 83 percent. If you were lucky enough to have only part of your arm blown away, your chances of dying improved to 24 percent.

Surgeons didn't sterilize equipment, they wore blood-splattered coats, and they didn't wash their hands. But they weren't butchers or anything. Amputees-to-be were blissfully free of consciousness during the procedure — the surgeon would administer chloroform and then do his work quickly, so (hopefully) when the chloroform wore off he would be busily sawing someone else's limb off. That's not to say losing a limb during the Civil War wasn't deeply sucky, but at least anesthesia was more than a shot of whiskey and a chunk of wood.