Angel’s Glow

The Civil War’s Battle of Shiloh left 23,000 casualties. It was a horrible battle, but something was about to happen with the wounded men…something no one expected and something they had no way to explain…at the time anyway. While in the hospital, some wounded soldiers began emitting a faint greenish-blue glow. Can you just imagine the thoughts going through the heads of those doctors? Then, something even more strange started happening. While the cause of the glow was unknown at the time, doctors observed that those with the mysterious glow tended to heal more quickly. That earned the greenish-blue glow the name of “Angel’s Glow” and the name stuck. I’m sure the doctors soon started praying for every wounded soldier to receive the strange glow.

“Angel’s Glow” would remain a mystery for nearly 140 years. Finally, the mystery behind this weird fact from history was solved. In 2001, a high school student named Bill Martin and his microbiologist mother, Phyllis, investigated the phenomenon and found it was likely caused by a bacterium called Photorhabdus Luminescens. This glowing bacterium may have even helped the soldiers recover by consuming other harmful bacteria or pathogens they encountered on the battlefield. Photorhabdus luminescens, formerly known as Xenorhabdus luminescens, is a Gammaproteobacterium in the Morganellaceae family and a deadly pathogen to insects.

There are no contemporary accounts of this phenomenon, meaning that it may be “a myth or that conditions including low temperatures, low lighting, abundance of blood, time on battlefield, presence of specific vegetation, presence of rain and humidity, and the time to organize medical evacuation would prevent the phenomenon from recurring in current conditions. Photorhabdus Luminescens’ genome has been sequenced. It contains a MACPF protein, however, this molecule appears non-lytic. It also contains the gcvB RNA gene which encodes a small non-coding RNA involved in the regulation of a number of amino acid transport systems as well as amino acid biosynthetic genes. A deletion of the hfq gene causes loss of secondary metabolite production.” That doesn’t seem so odd when you consider that many records, especially those that seemed inconsequential or maybe too farfetched to be believable, might have been overlooked or hidden. Still, I would think that the doctors might have talked to other doctors to see if they had ever heard of such a thing. Or maybe they didn’t, because they didn’t want to look like they had some kind of “battle fatigue” or PTSD as we know it today. Whatever the case may be, the phenomenon was not well publicized, yet somehow the story did survive the Civil War. I guess there were a few people who talked.