"Report found of 1st doctor to treat Lincoln after shooting" Associated Press, June 06, 2012
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - The first doctor to reach President
Abraham Lincoln after he was shot in a Washington theater rushed to the
presidential 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 his efforts to help the mortally wounded
president, written just hours after Lincoln’s death, was discovered in a
box at the National Archives late last month.
The doctor, who sat 40 feet from Lincoln at Ford’s Theater that night
in April 1865, saw John Wilkes Booth jump to the stage, brandishing a
dagger, and heard the cry that the “President has been murdered’’ before
pushing his way through the crowd. Thinking Lincoln had been stabbed,
Leale ordered men to cut off the president’s coat.
“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, and found
that it had entered the encephalon,’’ said Leale in the report.
The historians who discovered the report believe it was filed, packed
in a box, stored at the archives, and not seen for 147 years.
A researcher for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, Helena Iles
Papaioannou, found it among correspondence of the US surgeon general
from April 1865, filed under “L’’ for Leale.
--more--"
What is truly sad is that Hollywood has turned him into a vampire hunter for a whole generation of clueless kids.
