April 20, 2023 • 36 mins
In part one of this two-part series on Body Bags hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack take listeners through the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and its aftermath. They describe the chaos at Ford's Theater, the attending physicians' struggles as they assessed Lincoln's condition with limited medical knowledge and tools, the removal of Lincoln's body, and the irony of increased security after the assassination. They also delve into the autopsy process, highlighting the physicians' extensive experience and the challenges they faced.
Time-codes:
00:20 - Start of show.
01:35 - John Wilkes Booth's actions in the theater.
02:00 - Immediate response to the shooting.
02:35 - Lincoln's condition when the surgeon arrived.
03:15 - Initial confusion among the audience.
04:00 - Booth's calculated timing for the shooting.
05:30 - Surgeon realizes Lincoln's gunshot wound location.
05:55 - Limitations of medical knowledge and tools.
07:40 - Lincoln stops breathing and has dilated pupils.
08:10 - Surgeon removes clot, Lincoln breathes again.
09:20 - Difficulty transporting Lincoln to the White House.
09:55 - Physicians try to locate the lead ball in Lincoln's head.
11:30 - Attempt to drain blood and reduce intracranial pressure.
12:00 - Lincoln's death at 7:30 a.m.
13:50 - Lincoln remains unconscious throughout the ordeal.
16:40 - Removal of Lincoln's body from the boarding house.
17:15 - Absence of security and irony of increased security.
18:00 - Lincoln's tendency to dismiss security.
18:40 - Lincoln's body conveyed to White House for autopsy.
19:55 - Handsaw used to open Lincoln's skull.
21:10 - Delicate nature of dissecting the brain.
22:15 - Autopsy challenges: lack of electricity, reliance on touch.
23:00 - Physicians' extensive experience in dealing with trauma.
29:40 - Modern gunshot wound examination process.
30:30 - Role of x-rays in understanding bullet trajectories.
31:15 - Autopsy confirms nothing could have saved Lincoln.
32:55 - Limitations of 1800s medical treatments.
33:30 - John Wilkes Booth's autopsy.
34:50 - Physician's anger and resentment towards Booth.
35:30 - Booth's body relocation before returning to family.
36:05 - Outro.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan. How many times in movies
over the years have we heard somebody say, is there
a doctor in the house. I've often wondered about the
origin of that comment, because you know, it's used theatrically
(00:30):
many times. I know that obviously that has occurred in
real life. Is there a doctor in the house? Is
there a doctor? President? That night in Fort's theater, a
call was put out to the audience, is there a surgeon?
Is there a surgeon? Today we're going to talk about
the assassination an autopsy of our sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln.
(00:55):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags. Dave mac
We've got so much information here. Let's continue on with part.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Two as we look at what has taken place. This
is the part that, like millions of other people, I
can't understand what happened. Next, we've got John Willkes Booth
in the theater where he obviously had access because people
knew who he was. Now Booth's standing there, he pulls
(01:27):
the trigger. He shoots the president in the head and
then proceeds to slash major wrathbone and then leaps from
the presidential booth to the stage. That's the story, and
that Wrathbone tried to grab his jacket, causing Booth to
land awkwardly, possibly breaking his leg as he landed. And
(01:48):
then the hunt was on everybody else. As you mentioned,
is there a surgeon in the house. The president has
been shot in the head. They have to immediately get
him out of where he is and get him into
the care of doctors. I'm sure they just don't grab
him up like a child and run out of there.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
No, when he was initially, when the first assessment was
made by the surgeon that rolled into the box, he
noted that the president was still seated in his chair,
in the presidential chair there in the booth, and he
was leaning to his right. So the defect or where
the injury is is going to be on the left,
(02:27):
rear or posterior aspect of the president's skull, and Mary
Todd Lincoln was kind of cradling he was leaning over
on top of her. He's a big man too, i mean,
Tala's president we've ever had. He's leaning over onto the
first lady and she's kind of diminutive, so you can
see this giant of a man. She's cradling she's I'm
(02:48):
sure she's weeping. She's hysterical at this point, and the
surgeon arrives and they know that he's I don't know
that they know he's been mortally wounded. As as a
matter of fact, people saw people report hearing the report
of the weapon, many people pause because they thought that
it was part of the play. Can you imagine that?
(03:09):
And I think that it's much the same kind of
response that we would have today. We're not automatically going
to think that somebody has just been the victim of
homicide right in front of us. We think if you're
at an entertainment venue like this, you're going to think, oh,
this is just part of the play, and somebody's down
on the stage. They leapt from a box very dramatically,
and I think even Booth shouted out. Some people debate
(03:32):
over what he said. Six sempra Tyrannus, I think, which
is the state modol Virginia, death to tyrants. I think.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
But you mentioned earlier that he knew the play. Yeah,
he picked an actual part of the play where people
might think it was part of the show, So he
knew what he was doing. In terms of the potential getaway.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
So there's kind of this delay that occurs. It's reported
that Mary Todd Lincoln screamed, and it's at that point
it kind of show at everybody. They realized that something
truly horrible has happened, and you have people that are
in attendance. A young surgeon had made his way up
to the box and when he was taking a look
(04:12):
at at President Lincoln, he's trying to assess, which is
what surgeons do. That's what physicians do. They're trying to
assess a patient to try to understand, first off, if
it's trauma related, where is this these insults to the
body that we're looking for. At first, he saw blood
on the shoulder. People did see the knife. You know,
this Philadelphia pocket pistol is easily concealed. They heard what
(04:35):
sounded like gunfire, but there was nothing to validate. But
Boots got this knife that actually looks like a big
Bowie knife, gigantic hilt, lengthy blade. He's brandishing this thing.
Rathbone has been cut at this point from his shoulder
down to his elbow. I think he's been slashed. So
(04:55):
the surgeon, his first inclination is to think, well, maybe
this is a cut, maybe the president has been slashed
in some way. But then as he begins to kind
of work his hand up to the president's hairline, he
pulls it away and he notes that there's blood on
the back of the skull, on the back of his head,
and then he knows what he's dealing with. He's dealing
(05:17):
with a gunshot one, which is something he would not
have been unfamiliar with. Remember we're still in the midst
of a war.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Back then, and they didn't have X rays, they didn't
have MRIs, they didn't have any means of figuring out
what kind of damage has been done. We just at
this point know that the president has been shot in
the head. What do they do? Start poking? How do
they know?
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Well, what they know. The first thing they do is
they're using their bare hands, which look, you can't fault
these people for doing that. And I got to tell you,
I mean, if you've got somebody there and you don't
have surgical gloves only, you're going to use your hands
as well. But you there's a higher there's the bar
is a bit higher for surgeons, certainly today there are
but you know, the only way that you can kind
of assess what's going on, is that you're going to
(06:03):
feel for a defect, and it would have been a
circular defect that he would have sustained. And if folks
that are listening, if you will find that bony protuberance
on the back of your skull, it's kind of this
bump on the back of it. Okay, that's the occipital area.
Some people call it the occiput. This injury is going
(06:23):
to be three inches behind what they called the external
auditory meatus, which is essentially your ear hole. So it's
going to be to the rear of the left ear
and slightly to the left of the midline. So if
you find the back of your skull, find the middle
(06:45):
of it, below the occiput, that bony protuberance, and go
right there below that area on the back of your head.
That's where the president's gunshot wound is. So when it entered,
it actually pushed through the cerebellum, which is that portion
of the brain that sits at the base of the brain.
It was tough to assess the track of the wound,
(07:08):
and even today you don't have immediate access to X
ray or be able to make some kind of diagnostic assessment.
But the president, for a time at least, had stopped
breathing and his pupils were dilated. He had either shallow
respirations or no respirations at all. But guess what, when
this initial responding surgeon places his hand adjacent finds the defect,
(07:30):
he pulls out a clot of blood which had been
creating pressure at that point in time. And when he
pulled out that clot of blood, Lincoln starts breathing again.
So with that spark, with that moment, there's probably hope.
Certainly everybody else is not really going to know what's
going on. But the surgeon says, Okay, I've done this assessment.
(07:51):
I've removed this clot of blood. You know what, maybe
there's a chance the president is breathing. Now what do
you do with him? Because we know, we know that
they had made the assessment even up in that box
that they could not take him very far. He sustained
a gunshot wound to the head. They know that he's
probably not going to be long for this world. That
(08:12):
we didn't have, You didn't have escalades that drive smoothly
down the road on paved roads. At best roads were cobblestone,
and in DC at that particular time, it was nothing
to have dirt streets, and those would have wagon wheel
ruts in them. So you take somebody that has got,
(08:35):
let's face it, probably one of the most serious head
wounds that you can sustain, and you put them in
the back of a buggy or the back of a
wagon and try to convey them all the way back
to the White House, which is some distance away down
these bumpy roads. It probably wouldn't last one block. So
they've got to get him somewhere. In the closest place
is boarding house. It's immediately across the street from Ford's Theater.
(08:56):
And people have heard this tale before, but you have
to be able to assess the president in his current status.
The bed that they found Lincoln's a tall guide. They
had to place him, they'd say obliquely, they use that term,
but it's kind of diagonally across the bed, so that
he would he could fit on it. And soon you've
got all of these surgeons gathering at the house. Not
(09:18):
to mention any kind of other officials, but here's the thing.
When you've got more than one physician in the room,
everybody's going to have a different opinion and just think
about the added pressure of having the president there. What
they did know is that they were going to try
to have to assess the location as they refer to
the location of the ball. We refer to them as
(09:40):
projectiles now most of the time, but they refer to
these as balls. And this goes all the way back
to muzzle loading days of Revolutionary War and up to
that day. In particular, because it was a ball shape.
It was a spherical lead ball that had been fired
into the president's head, they had to try to determine
the track of the wound, where did it go, where
(10:00):
did it wind up? And they had this interesting kind
of probe, which is fascinating. They didn't have X ray,
so what they would do is that they would insert
this probe that had this kind of fin like shape
to it, and as you go into the track of
the wound, there was a certain feel that this probe
(10:22):
would generate as it made contact with the metallic body
in there. And this was disrupted a few times because
as they're doing this assessment with this probe, they're encountering
not the lead ball, but they're encountering fractured bits of
skull because the ball itself cavitated through the area, but
(10:44):
as it's passing through the external table of the skull,
it's creating other little satellite projectiles that are pointy, they're jagged,
so they're tearing apart any of the little vessels, and
there are many in the brain, and you're creating this
cavitated area that's filling up with blood. They're trying to
(11:05):
keep it drained because they do know, even at that
primitive state that they were in and understanding of how
the brain functions, the more pressure you have entercranial pressure,
you have the higher probability that you're going to lose
a patient. So they were trying their best to keep
this clotted blood out, essentially draining that area's best they
(11:26):
could in that boarding house. He survived. He survived remarkably,
I think roughly in the neighborhood of about eight hours.
They didn't call it until seven thirty am. This had happened,
I believe, shortly after ten pm that night when he
was shot. So the fact that they were able to
help him survive that long is quite the feat. He
(11:50):
just he couldn't as the night went by, his breathing
became progressively more labor There was another moment in time
where they were able to remove a clotted area of blood.
Again is breathing picked back up. But at that point
time you can't get in to this area. They don't
have the ability, They don't have the technology and the
tools to be able to perform surgery on the president.
(12:13):
This is in fact a mortal wound.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Backing up for just a second, do they at that
time take into account the muzzle velocity and this fact
that it is just a ball as to how far
it could traverse into his brain And are they thinking, hey,
we need to figure out a way to get that
out of there.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Probably this is the trouble. This is what the attendings
were faced with at this moment tom when they're attempting
to do this assessment day. They're sitting there and they're thinking,
how in the world are we going to retrieve this round?
And even if we retrieved around, what does this mean
for the president? What does this mean for his ability
(12:56):
to survive? What does it mean for if he does survive,
what his quality of life it's going to be? Like,
I think that they probably know the further that they
try to go down this wound track, there's a higher
probability they're going to compromise the brain's function. I think
that they know that, so these initial attempts to probe
(13:18):
I think were hopeful attempts.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Was he ever conscious he was.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Down, he was out the entirety. He never gained consciousness.
I think that there are a couple of reports that
he had begun to snore heavily at one point in time,
which is something that is associated with a diminishment many
times with patients that have sustained these fatal head traumas
that are kind of lingering, and all the while you've
got this other action that's going on. You know. I
(13:46):
talked about the clotting that was taking place, but when
they're assessing this wound on the back of his head,
they noted that there was they referred to as echimosis
that was developing around the entry wound. Well, aakamosis means
that there's swelling, it has the appearance of a bruise,
and they would have been able to appreciate this while
(14:06):
trying to assess him through kind of the fog of
the gunpowder residue, because there's going to be a tremendous
amount of deposition just from imagine something that is as
black as asphalt. When you're talking about black powder deposition
on an area like this, it would have just been
surrounding the wound. But they can see that there is
(14:29):
developing hemorrhage back there. They know that, and this is
just externally. They know that the capilliir beds have been
burst in this area. He's still breathing, he's still his
heart still pumping, so he's bleeding out into this area.
Swelling is occurring. Not only do you have swelling occurring
externally that they can appreciate vis via the echuamosis, but
there's also enter cranial pressure is building up because of
(14:52):
the swelling the trauma that the brain has gone through,
and the more it swells, the more it swells, the
more diminished the capacity of the brain to function, and
more compromise it has become. Interestingly enough, I'd mentioned the
wound track. It clipped the top of the left aspect
of the cerebellum, and then kind of there's been questions
(15:14):
over the years as to the exact track of the
of the wound, and we'll get to that in just
a second. Relative to the autopsy. But there is one
thought that the that the track of the round went
straight ahead toward the back of the left eye, okay,
and that would have left it in the left hemisphere
(15:35):
of the brain. Then there's another school of thought that
it traversed from left to right. So if you put
your hand back where I told you initially, your finger
back there where the entrance wound would have been, you
start there and then you go to the right orbit
of your eye, that the projectile would have lodged immediately
(15:55):
behind the right eye, and it kind of traversed diagonally
across the middle line. So you've got it crossing from
the left hemisphere of the brain into the right hemisphere
of the brain. We do know that the brain was
greatly damaged in this event, to the point where even
at autopsy they were having trouble assessing that. The president's
(16:33):
body was removed from the boarding house, It was placed
into a carriage, the body was given a cavalry escort.
There's a bit of I hate to use the word
irony in this because that can be misunderstood, but it's
fascinating to me that John Parker, the security guard, was
(16:56):
absent that night but as soon as as the president
was shot, they talked about the streets were filled filled
with mental horseback carrying sabers. You had tremendous security that
showed up after the fact. That's quite the tragedy. They
actually had to use soldiers to keep people back from
(17:17):
the boarding house. And it's easy to Monday morning quarterback,
but why not beforehand? A lot of this could have
been spared. That was just not in their way of thinking.
And Lincoln was notorious for slipping away. He was not
a pretentious person. They referred to him as rough hewn,
that he grew up in the wilderness, and he truly
(17:39):
did you know those areas that he occupied as a
small boy, starting in Kentucky, going to Indiana, and then
winding up in Illinois. That was a frontier man. It
was hard living and wasn't lace curtains and crystal chandeliers
and all that sort of stuff in his world. He
didn't like pretense, I don't think, and so he would
dismiss security periodically. He would he would not want to
(18:00):
be surrender. He wanted to be with people. That was
his nature. And so that night his body was conveyed
back to the White House, which is where the autopsy
actually took place. In one description, they talked about how
the room in which his body was examined was sparsely decorated,
which is kind of interesting given Mary Todd Lincoln's preoccupation
(18:24):
with spending lots of money on redecorating the White House.
There was even a congressional investigation into her expenditures. But
they placed him on a slatted surface, wooden boards covered
with sheets and cloths essentially, And to do the examination
there were multiple physicians there and who.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Would actually do it, Joe? Would it be the surgeon
that was on duty with him?
Speaker 1 (18:45):
You've got a couple of surgeons that were participating. There
was really you had doctors that studied disease, but you
didn't actually have what would be called a pathologist, okay,
like we have nowadays. You had a guy that was
a surgeon. For a long time, the term surgeon and
(19:05):
physician were kind of interchangeable. You had one surgeon, doctor Curtis,
that was present for the autopsy and was actually conducting
the autopsy. He's the person that removed the President's brain.
How do you go about opening a head in this
environment doing an autopsy? Well, you use it with a handsaw.
(19:27):
You do it with a handsaw, and they had a
very specific type of saw that they would have used.
It had a small wooden handle on it. The teeth
of the blade were more robust than say, for instance,
a hacksaw, but it is a saw nonetheless that would
have had to have been used to do this. I've
actually used a handsaw to open a skull at autopsy,
and it is laborious. We usually use a striker saw,
(19:50):
which is I've talked about before, which is this agitating
saw where the blade moves back rapidly back and forth,
and within just a couple of minutes, you'd have what's
referred to as the cal varium, which the calvarium is
actually created. It's created and some people call it the
skull cap. You remove it after the incision in the
(20:12):
bone is made with the saw, and once it's detached,
it's referred to as the calvarium, which is essentially the
roof of skull, so that you can get access to
the brain. That the trick is when you're opening a
skull at autopsy, you have to make sure that the
opening is sufficient to the size of the brain, because
if you're trying to take it out. The brain can
(20:34):
be described when you're touching it as having kind of
a gelatinous texture to it. It's very fragile, and most
brains are not immediately dissected. Many times when you dissect
a brain, what will happen is you will set it
aside and place it into a bucket of formulae, which
formulan is a type of formal the hide that's used
(20:55):
in a medical context. The ideal thing is to let
a brain set up about two weeks before you dissect it,
because you want it to be firm, and it takes
that long a time to get it to that consistency.
You have to make sure that the incision in the
bone is sufficient to the task so that calvarium when
you take it off, is that defect that it's created
(21:18):
by its absence, is large enough so that you can
get your fingers around the base of the brain into
the floor of the skull when they finally did get
their hands inside of the skull, and these doctors would
have been doing this bare handed, by the way, in case,
there was no such thing as a rubber glove at
this point on. So everything is done since a touch
(21:39):
they're kind of feeling their way around. I would imagine
that the room they would have been very respectful. I've
always wondered what kind of light source did they use.
There is no electricity, so are they doing everything with
some type of lantern? Perhaps is there another person standing
there with a lantern that's illuminating the area. Maybe the
lantern has a mirror on it to take advantage of
(22:02):
the reflected light, and you're shining it onto this area.
But a lot of stuff is having to be done
by touch.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
We look at it from the standpoint of what we
have now and how we work and how we go
about things. But for them, president of the United States
of America would get the best care and post warning,
he would get the best of the best at that time.
So even when we talk about them using their bare hands,
these are experienced individuals.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yeah, these guys would have seen, Dave. I cannot emphasize
to our listeners how much experience these people would have had.
Even if you had not been on the battlefield, there
was so much trauma. I don't know if any point
in time in our history as a country, the medical
sciences have been around this level of trauma that they
had witnessed lowthies four to five years prior to this event,
(22:53):
where you had people's lives just blasted, their bodies are
just blasted apart, and they're trying to do everything that
you can to save them. These guys would have been
highly skilled for that day, and highly skilled in the
sense that there was a lot of stuff they were
having to do blind, and of course it was you know,
in our eyes, it was very barbaric. There were a
lot of amputations back then and this sort of thing,
and the person that was using the saw, Dave. This
(23:15):
would not have been the first time that they had
had only saws in their hands. Goes back to the
old adage that I think I've stated before, See one
do one teach one that gaining this experience through all
of these cases being thrown at you. But when the
attendings and there were two, got their hands inside the skull,
one thing that they were able to appreciate was the
floor of the skull. If you think about the area
(23:38):
that's immediately adjacent up and above, behind, up, up and
above and behind your eyes. When the doctors got their
their hands into you know what, I guess what you
would refer to some people use the term the cranial vault.
You still you're probing, trying to remove the brain carefully.
(23:59):
Because the brain is greatly traumatized. Some people might use
a term called mascerated. It's really really chewed up at
this point as a result of this cavitating injury that's
generated by this rather ample projectile. When you're trying to
remove the brain, you're being very, very delicate, and even
to this day we try to be very delicate. When
we take a brain out of the skull. You're having
(24:21):
to trim away all of the connected vessels that are
coming up into the base of the brain, and also
the optic nerves to try to cut them loose. But
as they're running their hand on the underside of Lincoln's brain,
they notice something, they feel something, They know that the
floor of the skull, which directly above the eyes, is uneven.
(24:44):
I have actually cut my finger on the floor of
a skull before. When I'm running my hand trying to
remove the brain. You can clip the latex on glove.
The bones very sharp, So if you have these fractured
areas which Lincoln did, those bony prominences in there are
very thin. I mean they are eggshell thin, and the
(25:05):
edges of those bones become very very sharp. So as
this bullet is traveling through there, you not only have
the force of the projectile, the mass of that bullet
traveling through this very delicate tissue creating this cavity, You've
also got this kinetic energy that's being pressed through there,
and it comes out in like a wave and you
(25:26):
get these I've turned them as kind of concussive fractures,
if you will, where this energy is being transferred this
huge amount of pressure. Because just imagine this, you're creating
this hole that if you look at the tip of
your little finger right now, just look down the length
of it. Think about your little finger that's about at
(25:48):
the tip of it. That's going to be about the
size of the hole that this thing would have created.
So you're injecting this energy, this blast, this force through
this time little hole in an otherwise perfectly sealed environment.
So where's this energy going to go? Where it's going
to go. It's going to seek out the weakest points
(26:09):
and it's going to fracture. But this is significant for
them because this explained something else that they're seeing manifested
on Lincoln's body, which had been manifested before they actually
pronounced him dead, and that was his eyes were swelling,
the right eye in particular, and that gave them an
indication that that might be where the projectile rested. The
(26:30):
right eyes swelling. The pupil is completely blown. Now it's
dilated all the way out, there's no longer any kind
of nervous control over it. It's open. The eye is
progressively swelling, swelling, swelling, and this is confirming everything that
they're believing, but it's still it's still a confusing mass
(26:50):
that they're holding in their hand. They're wanting to get
to this projectile. They're wanting to find it. And one
of the doctors, when you're reading over the notes of
these positions that are involved in this examination, you can
actually sense that they knew what they were doing. And
when I let me rephrase that to this extent, they
(27:13):
knew what they were involved in. They were involved in
the post warm examination of a man who had led
the country through this horrible time, which they had borne
witness to. They had borne witness to it in a
way that no one else had, not even soldiers. They
had seen kind of the cost in the field hospitals
(27:35):
and the decisions that he had made along the way.
They knew that the man's brain that they were holding
in their hands had been making decisions directing the country
over all of these years. And they described kind of
the solemnity in that room, the quietness of it. And
(27:57):
the only thing that actually shattered those quiet moments was
when they finally removed that brain. There's blood and tissue
that's falling away from it. There's a basin down below
that's made out of porcelain. You've got this cavernous room.
It's very quiet. Earlier you heard the sound of that
sobbing drug across the surface of the bone, and all
(28:19):
of a sudden there was this metal clank sound. It
shattered the silence, absolutely shattered the silence. And what was it?
It was a mushroomed projectile. They never could pinpoint the
exact location of it, but almost like, I don't know,
(28:41):
some kind of metaphysical event. The bullet presents itself through
this announcement that shatters the silence, and you knew. I
think that they knew from as scientists that they had
found what they were looking for. Any kind of gunshot
(29:17):
woman that we have nowaday we do X rays prior
to doing the examination. First off, the configuration of the
bullet has changed. Because a bullet was a sphere when
it entered or when it exited that round, but when
it slammed into the back of the skull and it
met that bone, the makeup of that bullet changed at
that moment in time. It reconfigured itself. It's impacting bones,
(29:40):
so it's creating these little bits of bony shrapnel that
are being driven out into the brain, and also little
elements of that lead ball are being left behind. And
an X ray, when we put an X ray up
on a board on a lightboard, after we've taken this
X ray of the head, you can actually see a
little lead storm and it he gives you an idea
(30:00):
of the track of the round. So you can actually
if you do if you do a lateral X ray,
which means on the side X ray the side of
the head, you know, kind of like when you go
to get your X rays done at the doctor and
then you take an X ray face on. Laying the
face up, you get an idea of directionality. Does it
cross the midline? Those sorts of things we have that
(30:22):
advantage nowadays, they didn't. So at best, it's a guess
at this point in tom as to where it actually
wind up.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Did the actual autopsy provide closure relieving the doctors and
attendant surgeons of any responsibility in saving the president? I mean,
was there a thought, had they done something different, he
would not have died. But the autopsy confirmed there was
nothing that could have been done.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
It was actually assessed to be a mortal wound. Look,
anything that's been said about these physicians and how they
kind of ran their hands over this wound and they're
trying to save his life, it's all people being very
speculative about what was done wrong and what was done right.
You have to measure it by those times how they
were limited their ability to make an assessment on a
(31:12):
patient back then. But look, I got to tell you something,
these guys that were doing this assessment on the President,
I would tell you that. Okay, I'll put it to
you this way. Let's take a modern day surgeon, a
trauma surgeon, and put them into a field hospital in
eighteen sixty three in Gettysburg and have them do physical
(31:34):
assessment on a patient first off, in a less than
sterile environment, and without the aid of any kind of
radiographic assessment. It's tough. It's tough. I think that they
did the very best that they possibly could. And even
if he had survived, because it would appear that his
brain stem was left intact. You know, that's why he lived,
(31:54):
is for the link that he did. You know, his
chest to still rising and fall in the autonomic nervous
system is still intact to a certain degree, breathing, heart beating,
all those sorts of things. Did he have. Was he conscious? No?
Speaker 2 (32:07):
No?
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Would he have remained in a vegetative state? Well, yeah,
if they could have released the pressure on the skull,
on the brain, because the brain is going to continue
to swell. Well, they didn't have the tools. They didn't
have the medicines that we use, those anti inflammatory things
that we apply nowadays to try to keep swelling down.
That stuff didn't exist back then. And so they did
(32:29):
the best they could with what they had.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
And when everything was said and done, sixteenth President of
the United States of America dead, assassinated and a new
president is worn in, President Johnson.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, and with him came came the wrath of what
was to be known as Reconstruction. I think that probably,
and again I'm no historian reconstruction. I think took on
a different a different tenor than it would have otherwise.
Interestingly enough, you know, was within a month or so
after this that John Wilkes Booth is being autopsied. He's
been autopsied on the deck of the USS montak Up
(33:07):
in Washington. They had shot him in a barn. The
round that he took went between the C four and
the C five cervical vertebra, which they retained. They actually
kept that at his autopsy. The physicians actually trimmed that
out and kept it. You can see it in a
museum in DC to this day. He was immobile for
about two hours. They say that he lingered for that
(33:27):
period of time. Some people have said that he had
vocalized things. Other people say that he remained silent through it.
One of the famous things was he asked to see
his hands right before he died and made some kind
of comment like useless or something like that. But when
he died, they sewed his body up in an army
blanket and hauled him down down, put him on a tugboat,
(33:50):
and took him almost eighty miles away to the Uss Montalk.
And here's the big question with Booth, because he had
tried to change his appearance. He was known for this
this mustache they had, Well, he was absent that mustache.
When they got him, they took him onto the deck
of that boat, laid him out on a carpenter's table,
as they put it, and began to autopsy his body there.
(34:12):
If you want to get an idea of the attitude
of what happened, the physician that directed Lincoln's autopsy was
also there for the autopsy of John Wilkes Booth. He
showed up to the Navy yard and he's he's a
military officer, but he's an army officer. And when he
entered onto the deck of that ship, he didn't make
his presence known. And that's what you're supposed to do.
You're supposed to salute the flag and all those sort
(34:32):
of things that the Navy does. He went immediately, I
mean immediately to the body and started just kind of
he just immediately went in and started doing this autopsy
on John Wilkes Booth at this moment in time, without
a lot of fanfare. I mean, they're going at it, man,
They're going to do the autopsy, and that gives you
(34:54):
an idea there. You know, they were very angry, and
that's kind of I think demonstrated to a certain degree
in the way they treated boots body, and of course
Boot's body after they had done the autopsy and assessed it,
he was eventually buried, but his body was moved around
and disinturned several times before it finally wound back up
with a Booth family. So you've got these two men
(35:14):
that literally changed history, with Lincoln and Booths, both ending violently,
their lives ending very very violently. Boot's name is still
in our lexicon, but maybe it's there for a good
reason to remember the horror that he, through the single action,
wrought upon arguably the life of perhaps the best president
(35:34):
we've ever known, Abraham Lincoln. I'm Josephcott Morgan and this
is Bodybags
Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan. How many times in movies
over the years have we heard somebody say, is there
a doctor in the house. I've often wondered about the
origin of that comment, because you know, it's used theatrically
(00:30):
many times. I know that obviously that has occurred in
real life. Is there a doctor in the house? Is
there a doctor? President? That night in Fort's theater, a
call was put out to the audience, is there a surgeon?
Is there a surgeon? Today we're going to talk about
the assassination an autopsy of our sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln.
(00:55):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags. Dave mac
We've got so much information here. Let's continue on with part.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Two as we look at what has taken place. This
is the part that, like millions of other people, I
can't understand what happened. Next, we've got John Willkes Booth
in the theater where he obviously had access because people
knew who he was. Now Booth's standing there, he pulls
(01:27):
the trigger. He shoots the president in the head and
then proceeds to slash major wrathbone and then leaps from
the presidential booth to the stage. That's the story, and
that Wrathbone tried to grab his jacket, causing Booth to
land awkwardly, possibly breaking his leg as he landed. And
(01:48):
then the hunt was on everybody else. As you mentioned,
is there a surgeon in the house. The president has
been shot in the head. They have to immediately get
him out of where he is and get him into
the care of doctors. I'm sure they just don't grab
him up like a child and run out of there.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
No, when he was initially, when the first assessment was
made by the surgeon that rolled into the box, he
noted that the president was still seated in his chair,
in the presidential chair there in the booth, and he
was leaning to his right. So the defect or where
the injury is is going to be on the left,
(02:27):
rear or posterior aspect of the president's skull, and Mary
Todd Lincoln was kind of cradling he was leaning over
on top of her. He's a big man too, i mean,
Tala's president we've ever had. He's leaning over onto the
first lady and she's kind of diminutive, so you can
see this giant of a man. She's cradling she's I'm
(02:48):
sure she's weeping. She's hysterical at this point, and the
surgeon arrives and they know that he's I don't know
that they know he's been mortally wounded. As as a
matter of fact, people saw people report hearing the report
of the weapon, many people pause because they thought that
it was part of the play. Can you imagine that?
(03:09):
And I think that it's much the same kind of
response that we would have today. We're not automatically going
to think that somebody has just been the victim of
homicide right in front of us. We think if you're
at an entertainment venue like this, you're going to think, oh,
this is just part of the play, and somebody's down
on the stage. They leapt from a box very dramatically,
and I think even Booth shouted out. Some people debate
(03:32):
over what he said. Six sempra Tyrannus, I think, which
is the state modol Virginia, death to tyrants. I think.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
But you mentioned earlier that he knew the play. Yeah,
he picked an actual part of the play where people
might think it was part of the show, So he
knew what he was doing. In terms of the potential getaway.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
So there's kind of this delay that occurs. It's reported
that Mary Todd Lincoln screamed, and it's at that point
it kind of show at everybody. They realized that something
truly horrible has happened, and you have people that are
in attendance. A young surgeon had made his way up
to the box and when he was taking a look
(04:12):
at at President Lincoln, he's trying to assess, which is
what surgeons do. That's what physicians do. They're trying to
assess a patient to try to understand, first off, if
it's trauma related, where is this these insults to the
body that we're looking for. At first, he saw blood
on the shoulder. People did see the knife. You know,
this Philadelphia pocket pistol is easily concealed. They heard what
(04:35):
sounded like gunfire, but there was nothing to validate. But
Boots got this knife that actually looks like a big
Bowie knife, gigantic hilt, lengthy blade. He's brandishing this thing.
Rathbone has been cut at this point from his shoulder
down to his elbow. I think he's been slashed. So
(04:55):
the surgeon, his first inclination is to think, well, maybe
this is a cut, maybe the president has been slashed
in some way. But then as he begins to kind
of work his hand up to the president's hairline, he
pulls it away and he notes that there's blood on
the back of the skull, on the back of his head,
and then he knows what he's dealing with. He's dealing
(05:17):
with a gunshot one, which is something he would not
have been unfamiliar with. Remember we're still in the midst
of a war.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Back then, and they didn't have X rays, they didn't
have MRIs, they didn't have any means of figuring out
what kind of damage has been done. We just at
this point know that the president has been shot in
the head. What do they do? Start poking? How do
they know?
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Well, what they know. The first thing they do is
they're using their bare hands, which look, you can't fault
these people for doing that. And I got to tell you,
I mean, if you've got somebody there and you don't
have surgical gloves only, you're going to use your hands
as well. But you there's a higher there's the bar
is a bit higher for surgeons, certainly today there are
but you know, the only way that you can kind
of assess what's going on, is that you're going to
(06:03):
feel for a defect, and it would have been a
circular defect that he would have sustained. And if folks
that are listening, if you will find that bony protuberance
on the back of your skull, it's kind of this
bump on the back of it. Okay, that's the occipital area.
Some people call it the occiput. This injury is going
(06:23):
to be three inches behind what they called the external
auditory meatus, which is essentially your ear hole. So it's
going to be to the rear of the left ear
and slightly to the left of the midline. So if
you find the back of your skull, find the middle
(06:45):
of it, below the occiput, that bony protuberance, and go
right there below that area on the back of your head.
That's where the president's gunshot wound is. So when it entered,
it actually pushed through the cerebellum, which is that portion
of the brain that sits at the base of the brain.
It was tough to assess the track of the wound,
(07:08):
and even today you don't have immediate access to X
ray or be able to make some kind of diagnostic assessment.
But the president, for a time at least, had stopped
breathing and his pupils were dilated. He had either shallow
respirations or no respirations at all. But guess what, when
this initial responding surgeon places his hand adjacent finds the defect,
(07:30):
he pulls out a clot of blood which had been
creating pressure at that point in time. And when he
pulled out that clot of blood, Lincoln starts breathing again.
So with that spark, with that moment, there's probably hope.
Certainly everybody else is not really going to know what's
going on. But the surgeon says, Okay, I've done this assessment.
(07:51):
I've removed this clot of blood. You know what, maybe
there's a chance the president is breathing. Now what do
you do with him? Because we know, we know that
they had made the assessment even up in that box
that they could not take him very far. He sustained
a gunshot wound to the head. They know that he's
probably not going to be long for this world. That
(08:12):
we didn't have, You didn't have escalades that drive smoothly
down the road on paved roads. At best roads were cobblestone,
and in DC at that particular time, it was nothing
to have dirt streets, and those would have wagon wheel
ruts in them. So you take somebody that has got,
(08:35):
let's face it, probably one of the most serious head
wounds that you can sustain, and you put them in
the back of a buggy or the back of a
wagon and try to convey them all the way back
to the White House, which is some distance away down
these bumpy roads. It probably wouldn't last one block. So
they've got to get him somewhere. In the closest place
is boarding house. It's immediately across the street from Ford's Theater.
(08:56):
And people have heard this tale before, but you have
to be able to assess the president in his current status.
The bed that they found Lincoln's a tall guide. They
had to place him, they'd say obliquely, they use that term,
but it's kind of diagonally across the bed, so that
he would he could fit on it. And soon you've
got all of these surgeons gathering at the house. Not
(09:18):
to mention any kind of other officials, but here's the thing.
When you've got more than one physician in the room,
everybody's going to have a different opinion and just think
about the added pressure of having the president there. What
they did know is that they were going to try
to have to assess the location as they refer to
the location of the ball. We refer to them as
(09:40):
projectiles now most of the time, but they refer to
these as balls. And this goes all the way back
to muzzle loading days of Revolutionary War and up to
that day. In particular, because it was a ball shape.
It was a spherical lead ball that had been fired
into the president's head, they had to try to determine
the track of the wound, where did it go, where
(10:00):
did it wind up? And they had this interesting kind
of probe, which is fascinating. They didn't have X ray,
so what they would do is that they would insert
this probe that had this kind of fin like shape
to it, and as you go into the track of
the wound, there was a certain feel that this probe
(10:22):
would generate as it made contact with the metallic body
in there. And this was disrupted a few times because
as they're doing this assessment with this probe, they're encountering
not the lead ball, but they're encountering fractured bits of
skull because the ball itself cavitated through the area, but
(10:44):
as it's passing through the external table of the skull,
it's creating other little satellite projectiles that are pointy, they're jagged,
so they're tearing apart any of the little vessels, and
there are many in the brain, and you're creating this
cavitated area that's filling up with blood. They're trying to
(11:05):
keep it drained because they do know, even at that
primitive state that they were in and understanding of how
the brain functions, the more pressure you have entercranial pressure,
you have the higher probability that you're going to lose
a patient. So they were trying their best to keep
this clotted blood out, essentially draining that area's best they
(11:26):
could in that boarding house. He survived. He survived remarkably,
I think roughly in the neighborhood of about eight hours.
They didn't call it until seven thirty am. This had happened,
I believe, shortly after ten pm that night when he
was shot. So the fact that they were able to
help him survive that long is quite the feat. He
(11:50):
just he couldn't as the night went by, his breathing
became progressively more labor There was another moment in time
where they were able to remove a clotted area of blood.
Again is breathing picked back up. But at that point
time you can't get in to this area. They don't
have the ability, They don't have the technology and the
tools to be able to perform surgery on the president.
(12:13):
This is in fact a mortal wound.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Backing up for just a second, do they at that
time take into account the muzzle velocity and this fact
that it is just a ball as to how far
it could traverse into his brain And are they thinking, hey,
we need to figure out a way to get that
out of there.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Probably this is the trouble. This is what the attendings
were faced with at this moment tom when they're attempting
to do this assessment day. They're sitting there and they're thinking,
how in the world are we going to retrieve this round?
And even if we retrieved around, what does this mean
for the president? What does this mean for his ability
(12:56):
to survive? What does it mean for if he does survive,
what his quality of life it's going to be? Like,
I think that they probably know the further that they
try to go down this wound track, there's a higher
probability they're going to compromise the brain's function. I think
that they know that, so these initial attempts to probe
(13:18):
I think were hopeful attempts.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Was he ever conscious he was.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Down, he was out the entirety. He never gained consciousness.
I think that there are a couple of reports that
he had begun to snore heavily at one point in time,
which is something that is associated with a diminishment many
times with patients that have sustained these fatal head traumas
that are kind of lingering, and all the while you've
got this other action that's going on. You know. I
(13:46):
talked about the clotting that was taking place, but when
they're assessing this wound on the back of his head,
they noted that there was they referred to as echimosis
that was developing around the entry wound. Well, aakamosis means
that there's swelling, it has the appearance of a bruise,
and they would have been able to appreciate this while
(14:06):
trying to assess him through kind of the fog of
the gunpowder residue, because there's going to be a tremendous
amount of deposition just from imagine something that is as
black as asphalt. When you're talking about black powder deposition
on an area like this, it would have just been
surrounding the wound. But they can see that there is
(14:29):
developing hemorrhage back there. They know that, and this is
just externally. They know that the capilliir beds have been
burst in this area. He's still breathing, he's still his
heart still pumping, so he's bleeding out into this area.
Swelling is occurring. Not only do you have swelling occurring
externally that they can appreciate vis via the echuamosis, but
there's also enter cranial pressure is building up because of
(14:52):
the swelling the trauma that the brain has gone through,
and the more it swells, the more it swells, the
more diminished the capacity of the brain to function, and
more compromise it has become. Interestingly enough, I'd mentioned the
wound track. It clipped the top of the left aspect
of the cerebellum, and then kind of there's been questions
(15:14):
over the years as to the exact track of the
of the wound, and we'll get to that in just
a second. Relative to the autopsy. But there is one
thought that the that the track of the round went
straight ahead toward the back of the left eye, okay,
and that would have left it in the left hemisphere
(15:35):
of the brain. Then there's another school of thought that
it traversed from left to right. So if you put
your hand back where I told you initially, your finger
back there where the entrance wound would have been, you
start there and then you go to the right orbit
of your eye, that the projectile would have lodged immediately
(15:55):
behind the right eye, and it kind of traversed diagonally
across the middle line. So you've got it crossing from
the left hemisphere of the brain into the right hemisphere
of the brain. We do know that the brain was
greatly damaged in this event, to the point where even
at autopsy they were having trouble assessing that. The president's
(16:33):
body was removed from the boarding house, It was placed
into a carriage, the body was given a cavalry escort.
There's a bit of I hate to use the word
irony in this because that can be misunderstood, but it's
fascinating to me that John Parker, the security guard, was
(16:56):
absent that night but as soon as as the president
was shot, they talked about the streets were filled filled
with mental horseback carrying sabers. You had tremendous security that
showed up after the fact. That's quite the tragedy. They
actually had to use soldiers to keep people back from
(17:17):
the boarding house. And it's easy to Monday morning quarterback,
but why not beforehand? A lot of this could have
been spared. That was just not in their way of thinking.
And Lincoln was notorious for slipping away. He was not
a pretentious person. They referred to him as rough hewn,
that he grew up in the wilderness, and he truly
(17:39):
did you know those areas that he occupied as a
small boy, starting in Kentucky, going to Indiana, and then
winding up in Illinois. That was a frontier man. It
was hard living and wasn't lace curtains and crystal chandeliers
and all that sort of stuff in his world. He
didn't like pretense, I don't think, and so he would
dismiss security periodically. He would he would not want to
(18:00):
be surrender. He wanted to be with people. That was
his nature. And so that night his body was conveyed
back to the White House, which is where the autopsy
actually took place. In one description, they talked about how
the room in which his body was examined was sparsely decorated,
which is kind of interesting given Mary Todd Lincoln's preoccupation
(18:24):
with spending lots of money on redecorating the White House.
There was even a congressional investigation into her expenditures. But
they placed him on a slatted surface, wooden boards covered
with sheets and cloths essentially, And to do the examination
there were multiple physicians there and who.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Would actually do it, Joe? Would it be the surgeon
that was on duty with him?
Speaker 1 (18:45):
You've got a couple of surgeons that were participating. There
was really you had doctors that studied disease, but you
didn't actually have what would be called a pathologist, okay,
like we have nowadays. You had a guy that was
a surgeon. For a long time, the term surgeon and
(19:05):
physician were kind of interchangeable. You had one surgeon, doctor Curtis,
that was present for the autopsy and was actually conducting
the autopsy. He's the person that removed the President's brain.
How do you go about opening a head in this
environment doing an autopsy? Well, you use it with a handsaw.
(19:27):
You do it with a handsaw, and they had a
very specific type of saw that they would have used.
It had a small wooden handle on it. The teeth
of the blade were more robust than say, for instance,
a hacksaw, but it is a saw nonetheless that would
have had to have been used to do this. I've
actually used a handsaw to open a skull at autopsy,
and it is laborious. We usually use a striker saw,
(19:50):
which is I've talked about before, which is this agitating
saw where the blade moves back rapidly back and forth,
and within just a couple of minutes, you'd have what's
referred to as the cal varium, which the calvarium is
actually created. It's created and some people call it the
skull cap. You remove it after the incision in the
(20:12):
bone is made with the saw, and once it's detached,
it's referred to as the calvarium, which is essentially the
roof of skull, so that you can get access to
the brain. That the trick is when you're opening a
skull at autopsy, you have to make sure that the
opening is sufficient to the size of the brain, because
if you're trying to take it out. The brain can
(20:34):
be described when you're touching it as having kind of
a gelatinous texture to it. It's very fragile, and most
brains are not immediately dissected. Many times when you dissect
a brain, what will happen is you will set it
aside and place it into a bucket of formulae, which
formulan is a type of formal the hide that's used
(20:55):
in a medical context. The ideal thing is to let
a brain set up about two weeks before you dissect it,
because you want it to be firm, and it takes
that long a time to get it to that consistency.
You have to make sure that the incision in the
bone is sufficient to the task so that calvarium when
you take it off, is that defect that it's created
(21:18):
by its absence, is large enough so that you can
get your fingers around the base of the brain into
the floor of the skull when they finally did get
their hands inside of the skull, and these doctors would
have been doing this bare handed, by the way, in case,
there was no such thing as a rubber glove at
this point on. So everything is done since a touch
(21:39):
they're kind of feeling their way around. I would imagine
that the room they would have been very respectful. I've
always wondered what kind of light source did they use.
There is no electricity, so are they doing everything with
some type of lantern? Perhaps is there another person standing
there with a lantern that's illuminating the area. Maybe the
lantern has a mirror on it to take advantage of
(22:02):
the reflected light, and you're shining it onto this area.
But a lot of stuff is having to be done
by touch.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
We look at it from the standpoint of what we
have now and how we work and how we go
about things. But for them, president of the United States
of America would get the best care and post warning,
he would get the best of the best at that time.
So even when we talk about them using their bare hands,
these are experienced individuals.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yeah, these guys would have seen, Dave. I cannot emphasize
to our listeners how much experience these people would have had.
Even if you had not been on the battlefield, there
was so much trauma. I don't know if any point
in time in our history as a country, the medical
sciences have been around this level of trauma that they
had witnessed lowthies four to five years prior to this event,
(22:53):
where you had people's lives just blasted, their bodies are
just blasted apart, and they're trying to do everything that
you can to save them. These guys would have been
highly skilled for that day, and highly skilled in the
sense that there was a lot of stuff they were
having to do blind, and of course it was you know,
in our eyes, it was very barbaric. There were a
lot of amputations back then and this sort of thing,
and the person that was using the saw, Dave. This
(23:15):
would not have been the first time that they had
had only saws in their hands. Goes back to the
old adage that I think I've stated before, See one
do one teach one that gaining this experience through all
of these cases being thrown at you. But when the
attendings and there were two, got their hands inside the skull,
one thing that they were able to appreciate was the
floor of the skull. If you think about the area
(23:38):
that's immediately adjacent up and above, behind, up, up and
above and behind your eyes. When the doctors got their
their hands into you know what, I guess what you
would refer to some people use the term the cranial vault.
You still you're probing, trying to remove the brain carefully.
(23:59):
Because the brain is greatly traumatized. Some people might use
a term called mascerated. It's really really chewed up at
this point as a result of this cavitating injury that's
generated by this rather ample projectile. When you're trying to
remove the brain, you're being very, very delicate, and even
to this day we try to be very delicate. When
we take a brain out of the skull. You're having
(24:21):
to trim away all of the connected vessels that are
coming up into the base of the brain, and also
the optic nerves to try to cut them loose. But
as they're running their hand on the underside of Lincoln's brain,
they notice something, they feel something, They know that the
floor of the skull, which directly above the eyes, is uneven.
(24:44):
I have actually cut my finger on the floor of
a skull before. When I'm running my hand trying to
remove the brain. You can clip the latex on glove.
The bones very sharp, So if you have these fractured
areas which Lincoln did, those bony prominences in there are
very thin. I mean they are eggshell thin, and the
(25:05):
edges of those bones become very very sharp. So as
this bullet is traveling through there, you not only have
the force of the projectile, the mass of that bullet
traveling through this very delicate tissue creating this cavity, You've
also got this kinetic energy that's being pressed through there,
and it comes out in like a wave and you
(25:26):
get these I've turned them as kind of concussive fractures,
if you will, where this energy is being transferred this
huge amount of pressure. Because just imagine this, you're creating
this hole that if you look at the tip of
your little finger right now, just look down the length
of it. Think about your little finger that's about at
(25:48):
the tip of it. That's going to be about the
size of the hole that this thing would have created.
So you're injecting this energy, this blast, this force through
this time little hole in an otherwise perfectly sealed environment.
So where's this energy going to go? Where it's going
to go. It's going to seek out the weakest points
(26:09):
and it's going to fracture. But this is significant for
them because this explained something else that they're seeing manifested
on Lincoln's body, which had been manifested before they actually
pronounced him dead, and that was his eyes were swelling,
the right eye in particular, and that gave them an
indication that that might be where the projectile rested. The
(26:30):
right eyes swelling. The pupil is completely blown. Now it's
dilated all the way out, there's no longer any kind
of nervous control over it. It's open. The eye is
progressively swelling, swelling, swelling, and this is confirming everything that
they're believing, but it's still it's still a confusing mass
(26:50):
that they're holding in their hand. They're wanting to get
to this projectile. They're wanting to find it. And one
of the doctors, when you're reading over the notes of
these positions that are involved in this examination, you can
actually sense that they knew what they were doing. And
when I let me rephrase that to this extent, they
(27:13):
knew what they were involved in. They were involved in
the post warm examination of a man who had led
the country through this horrible time, which they had borne
witness to. They had borne witness to it in a
way that no one else had, not even soldiers. They
had seen kind of the cost in the field hospitals
(27:35):
and the decisions that he had made along the way.
They knew that the man's brain that they were holding
in their hands had been making decisions directing the country
over all of these years. And they described kind of
the solemnity in that room, the quietness of it. And
(27:57):
the only thing that actually shattered those quiet moments was
when they finally removed that brain. There's blood and tissue
that's falling away from it. There's a basin down below
that's made out of porcelain. You've got this cavernous room.
It's very quiet. Earlier you heard the sound of that
sobbing drug across the surface of the bone, and all
(28:19):
of a sudden there was this metal clank sound. It
shattered the silence, absolutely shattered the silence. And what was it?
It was a mushroomed projectile. They never could pinpoint the
exact location of it, but almost like, I don't know,
(28:41):
some kind of metaphysical event. The bullet presents itself through
this announcement that shatters the silence, and you knew. I
think that they knew from as scientists that they had
found what they were looking for. Any kind of gunshot
(29:17):
woman that we have nowaday we do X rays prior
to doing the examination. First off, the configuration of the
bullet has changed. Because a bullet was a sphere when
it entered or when it exited that round, but when
it slammed into the back of the skull and it
met that bone, the makeup of that bullet changed at
that moment in time. It reconfigured itself. It's impacting bones,
(29:40):
so it's creating these little bits of bony shrapnel that
are being driven out into the brain, and also little
elements of that lead ball are being left behind. And
an X ray, when we put an X ray up
on a board on a lightboard, after we've taken this
X ray of the head, you can actually see a
little lead storm and it he gives you an idea
(30:00):
of the track of the round. So you can actually
if you do if you do a lateral X ray,
which means on the side X ray the side of
the head, you know, kind of like when you go
to get your X rays done at the doctor and
then you take an X ray face on. Laying the
face up, you get an idea of directionality. Does it
cross the midline? Those sorts of things we have that
(30:22):
advantage nowadays, they didn't. So at best, it's a guess
at this point in tom as to where it actually
wind up.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Did the actual autopsy provide closure relieving the doctors and
attendant surgeons of any responsibility in saving the president? I mean,
was there a thought, had they done something different, he
would not have died. But the autopsy confirmed there was
nothing that could have been done.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
It was actually assessed to be a mortal wound. Look,
anything that's been said about these physicians and how they
kind of ran their hands over this wound and they're
trying to save his life, it's all people being very
speculative about what was done wrong and what was done right.
You have to measure it by those times how they
were limited their ability to make an assessment on a
(31:12):
patient back then. But look, I got to tell you something,
these guys that were doing this assessment on the President,
I would tell you that. Okay, I'll put it to
you this way. Let's take a modern day surgeon, a
trauma surgeon, and put them into a field hospital in
eighteen sixty three in Gettysburg and have them do physical
(31:34):
assessment on a patient first off, in a less than
sterile environment, and without the aid of any kind of
radiographic assessment. It's tough. It's tough. I think that they
did the very best that they possibly could. And even
if he had survived, because it would appear that his
brain stem was left intact. You know, that's why he lived,
(31:54):
is for the link that he did. You know, his
chest to still rising and fall in the autonomic nervous
system is still intact to a certain degree, breathing, heart beating,
all those sorts of things. Did he have. Was he conscious? No?
Speaker 2 (32:07):
No?
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Would he have remained in a vegetative state? Well, yeah,
if they could have released the pressure on the skull,
on the brain, because the brain is going to continue
to swell. Well, they didn't have the tools. They didn't
have the medicines that we use, those anti inflammatory things
that we apply nowadays to try to keep swelling down.
That stuff didn't exist back then. And so they did
(32:29):
the best they could with what they had.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
And when everything was said and done, sixteenth President of
the United States of America dead, assassinated and a new
president is worn in, President Johnson.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, and with him came came the wrath of what
was to be known as Reconstruction. I think that probably,
and again I'm no historian reconstruction. I think took on
a different a different tenor than it would have otherwise.
Interestingly enough, you know, was within a month or so
after this that John Wilkes Booth is being autopsied. He's
been autopsied on the deck of the USS montak Up
(33:07):
in Washington. They had shot him in a barn. The
round that he took went between the C four and
the C five cervical vertebra, which they retained. They actually
kept that at his autopsy. The physicians actually trimmed that
out and kept it. You can see it in a
museum in DC to this day. He was immobile for
about two hours. They say that he lingered for that
(33:27):
period of time. Some people have said that he had
vocalized things. Other people say that he remained silent through it.
One of the famous things was he asked to see
his hands right before he died and made some kind
of comment like useless or something like that. But when
he died, they sewed his body up in an army
blanket and hauled him down down, put him on a tugboat,
(33:50):
and took him almost eighty miles away to the Uss Montalk.
And here's the big question with Booth, because he had
tried to change his appearance. He was known for this
this mustache they had, Well, he was absent that mustache.
When they got him, they took him onto the deck
of that boat, laid him out on a carpenter's table,
as they put it, and began to autopsy his body there.
(34:12):
If you want to get an idea of the attitude
of what happened, the physician that directed Lincoln's autopsy was
also there for the autopsy of John Wilkes Booth. He
showed up to the Navy yard and he's he's a
military officer, but he's an army officer. And when he
entered onto the deck of that ship, he didn't make
his presence known. And that's what you're supposed to do.
You're supposed to salute the flag and all those sort
(34:32):
of things that the Navy does. He went immediately, I
mean immediately to the body and started just kind of
he just immediately went in and started doing this autopsy
on John Wilkes Booth at this moment in time, without
a lot of fanfare. I mean, they're going at it, man,
They're going to do the autopsy, and that gives you
(34:54):
an idea there. You know, they were very angry, and
that's kind of I think demonstrated to a certain degree
in the way they treated boots body, and of course
Boot's body after they had done the autopsy and assessed it,
he was eventually buried, but his body was moved around
and disinturned several times before it finally wound back up
with a Booth family. So you've got these two men
(35:14):
that literally changed history, with Lincoln and Booths, both ending violently,
their lives ending very very violently. Boot's name is still
in our lexicon, but maybe it's there for a good
reason to remember the horror that he, through the single action,
wrought upon arguably the life of perhaps the best president
(35:34):
we've ever known, Abraham Lincoln. I'm Josephcott Morgan and this
is Bodybags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.