Researchers find report from first doctor to treat Lincoln after gunshot wound
8:38 pm in Abraham Lincoln, American History, april 1865, army surgeon, charles leale, coagula, Featured, foxnews com, gunshot wound, john wilkes booth, occipital bone, president abraham lincoln by PinkTeaPatriot
Source: FoxNews.com
Posted: June 7th 2012
The first doctor to reach President Abraham Lincoln after he was shot in a Washington theater rushed to his ceremonial box and found him paralyzed, comatose and leaning against his wife. Dr. Charles Leale ordered brandy and water to be brought immediately.
Leale’s long-lost report of efforts to help the mortally wounded president, written just hours after his death, was discovered in a box at the National Archives late last month.
This photo of a document from the National Archives by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in Springfield, Ill., shows the third page of an original copy of a 21-page clinical report by Dr. Charles A. Leale, who was the first doctor to treat President Abraham Lincoln after he was shot at a Washington theater on the night of April 14, 1865. The report is not in Leale's hand, but is a "true copy" written in the neat and legible hand of a clerk. It was found in May 2012 by a researcher for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project, which is dedicated to finding and saving all documents written by or about the 16th president during his lifetime. (AP Photo/National Archives document via the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum)
The Army surgeon, who sat 40 feet from Lincoln at Ford’s Theater that night in April 1865, saw assassin John Wilkes Booth jump to the stage, brandishing a dagger. Thinking Lincoln had been stabbed, Leale pushed his way to the victim but found a different injury.
“I commenced to examine his head (as no wound near the shoulder was found) and soon passed my fingers over a large firm clot of blood situated about one inch below the superior curved line of the occipital bone,” Leale reported. “The coagula I easily removed and passed the little finger of my left hand through the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball.”
The historians who discovered the report believe it was filed, packed in a box, stored at the archives and not seen for 147 years. While it doesn’t add much new information, “it’s the first draft” of the tragedy, said Daniel Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln.
