* “Impregnated via a Bullet?” was a one-paragraph letter to the Lancet that referred to a case report published in the same journal in 1875: Back in the American Civil War, a seventeen-year-old girl was watching a battle (people used to do this) when she was struck in the abdomen by a Union soldier’s bullet that had somehow gone through a Confederate soldier’s left testicle. She became pregnant and later married the Confederate soldier. (But son of a gun! I looked it up on Snopes, which reports that the story had been printed as a bit of fun in the American Medical Weekly in 1874. Journals that subsequently reprinted portions of it as fact did not catch the gag. If nothing else, the name of the “doctor” reporting it—L. G. Capers—should have been a hint.)