About 20 years ago, I was offered the opportunity to play Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire in a History Channel miniseries. I didn’t have a speaking part—just a reenactment. McGuire was the surgeon who happened to amputate the left arm of Gen. Stonewall Jackson. Jackson died of infection from his wounds. The interesting thing about those Civil War years was that the primary surgery of that time was amputation, and the main cause of death was infection. The primary suture of the time was either cotton or catgut (twisted sheep or horse intestine). McGuire had a severe shortage of both. Someone came up with the idea to use the skirt of a horse (the long coarse hair of the horse’s tail) as suture material. The problem was that horse skirt hair is very coarse and hard to manipulate and tie. The simple solution was to boil it so that it became …