Deborah Sampson: The Woman Who Dug a Musket Ball From Her Leg

In 1782, a wounded Revolutionary War soldier fought off comrades trying to take them to a doctor, then snuck out of the hospital to dig a musket ball from their own thigh with a penknife and sewing needle, all to protect a secret. That soldier was a woman named Deborah Sampson.This episode examines the lengths a person will go to escape a life of predetermined poverty and servitude, tracing Sampson from abandoned indentured servant to elite shock trooper to one of America's first female lecturers.Her brutal childhood: an absent father, a destitute mother descended from a Plymouth governor, and self-education by intercepting the Thomas boys' schoolworkWhy she enlisted as Robert Shurtleff in the Light Infantry, using the army's tallest-and-strongest sorting to hide her own heightThe self-surgery at Tarrytown and how her cover finally broke during a fever epidemic, with Dr. Barnabas Binney hiding her in his own homeHer post-war fight for back pay, her stage tour performing the 27-step manual of arms, and Paul Revere's lobbying for her federal pensionThe historical debate over her gender and sexuality, including the flirtation with the Baltimore Lady, and the 2020 Deborah Sampson Act