Angel Glow

I am busy rereading the Outlander 2 book, Dragonfly in Amber,  (Scribd link) and near the end of the book, there is a conversation of Claire with Jamie about glowing of dead bodies in a nearby battle field.

Claire, who was a combat nurse in World War II, remembers a conversation about this phenomenon when she cared for a World War I veteran who saw this in the trenches there.

I am not sure if this was about the methane/"will of the wisp"/"corpse candles" from the rotting corpses, similar to that seen in swamps, (and described by Tolkien when Frodo and Sam traverse the Dead Marshes) or was this talking about the "angel glow" of a bio luminescent bacteria that grew in wounds of the dead and dying?

from Mental Floss:

All told, the fighting at the Battle of Shiloh left more than 16,000 soldiers wounded and more 3,000 dead, and neither federal or Confederate medics were prepared for the carnage. The bullet and bayonet wounds were bad enough on their own, but soldiers of the era were also prone to infections.

Wounds contaminated by shrapnel or dirt became warm, moist refuges for bacteria, which could feast on a buffet of damaged tissue....

Many soldiers died from infections that modern medicine would be able to nip in the bud.

Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.”...

the article goes on to explain how Photorhabdus luminescens that usually live in soil nematodes (worms) managed to do this...

it seems that the bacteria will not grow at body temperature, but at the Battle of Shiloh, it was cold and damp so many of the wounds were cool enough for the bacteria to find a home: and in doing so, they killed off the normal germs that would infect and kill the soldiers.




more HERE at Civil War medicine.

And here is an article about this phenomenon and other forms of bioluminescence at SciAmBlog.