The Fenimore Art Museumin Cooperstown , NY just opened a new installation , “ Autopsy for a Nation : The Death of Abraham Lincoln , ” mark the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln ’s blackwash . The exhibit ’s key item include handwritten notes by the physicians who comport the President ’s autopsy .
Lincolnwas shotApril 14 , 1865 by John Wilkes Booth while watch over a gambol at Ford ’s Theatre in Washington , D.C. The Civil War had ended just years earlier and the President ’s destruction was a terrible bump to a nation that was already in turmoil . The Fenimore exhibit will also feature other Lincoln - radical items tied to his death , but the elaborated autopsy musical note , which are part of the museum ’s collection , are the main curiosity .
Here are the written material of Dr. Joseph Janvier Woodward , with a transcript below :
eyelid and surrounding percentage of the face greatly ecchymosed . heart somewhat bellied from effusion of blood into the eye socket . There was a gunfire combat injury of the head around which the skull was greatly thickened by hemorrhage into its tissue . The musket ball had entered through the occipital bone about an inch to the leftfield of the average personal line of credit and just above the lateral venous sinus which it open ; it then penetrate the dura mater , passed through the later lobe of the cerebrum , enter the left lateral ventricle and lodged in the blanched matter of the cerebrum just above the interior portion of the corpus strictum where it was found . The wound in the occipital bone was quite fluent and spherical in shape and beveled off from without inwards so that the opening of the tuble was larger than that through the extraneous tubal .
A fragment of the orb was launch in the orifice through the off-white . The cut of the ball was full of clotted blood and contained several minor fragments of off-white . The nous around the runway was pultaceus and livid from capillary bleeding into its substance . The heart ventricle of the brain were full of clotted blood . A duncical clot beneath the dura mater coating the whole upper Earth’s surface of the right lobe of the cerebrum . There was a smaller coagulum under the dura mater of the remaining side . But little stemma was see at the base of the nous . Both the orbital plates of the frontal bone were fractured and the fragment pushed up towards the brain . The dura mater over these fractures was uninjured . The orbits gorged with blood …
And here are the note of Dr. Robert King Stone :
Shot . 1 in leave alone median line get over left sidelong sinus upper bound , through occipital bone toward edge of sidelong venous sinus . Thru occipital bone , touched ledge of lateral venous sinus , struck ulterior lobe traversing it in a horizontal piazza ( pass forward inclining to the right . ) In opening of combat injury a scale of measurement blood 2 ½ in . in track , small-arm of bone – 2 pieces of bone about 4 in in advance in trail of nut . Entered the left heart ventricle behind , followed the course of ventricle accurately , edge upward and inwards , ploughing thru the upper part of thalamus nervorum opticorum , other 2 lodged in intellectual topic just above the corpus stratum of the left-hand side . The brain caterpillar tread of egg was in a champagne disintegrate Department of State .
Both heart ventricle filled with pedigree . Whole brainiac engorged and bloody prints . More matter than wound . On go over , the dura mater was displaced with a large curdling of blood line – lying upon the correct hemisphere of the mastermind . review the dura mater , no wounding in which was detect , we found the orbital plates of both sides , the bum of comminuted cracking , the fragment being forced from within , outward . The orbit oculum palpitated tissue layer and cavity was filled with blood . Origin of which we did n’t search . The right had been notably protruded , later sank back after death . Ecchymoses of the remaining optic 1st and right eye 2nd .
Great oedema of sinus and a little rake extravasated about shot wound , clean cutting off as if by a lick . 2 human foot off orbital collection plate , very thin .
The installation run through December 31 .
credit : bank bill pack at Abraham Lincoln ’s Autopsy by Dr. J. J. Woodward ( top ) and Dr. Robert King Stone ( below ) , April 15 , 1865 . New York State Historical Association / Fenimore Art Museum , Cooperstown , New York
Top image by Currier and Ives via theLibrary of Congress
ViaMental Floss , h / t Lauren Davis
Abraham LincolnHistory
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