BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Natl Museum of Health and Medicine (Walter Reed) -- Exhibit: His Wound is Mortal: The Final Hours of President Abraham Lincoln

DC -- Natl Museum of Health and Medicine (Walter Reed) -- Exhibit: His Wound is Mortal: The Final Hours of President Abraham Lincoln:

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. NMHMLI_090411_009.JPG: Abraham Lincoln: The Final Casualty of the War: "THIS dust was once the Man. Gentle, plain, just and resolute -- under whose cautious hand, Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age, Was saved the Union of These States." -- Walt Whitman
2. NMHMLI_090411_015.JPG: Remains of U.S. Infantry colors from President Lincoln's box on the night he was assassinated: canton of the national color of the U.S. Treasury Guard, a reserve unit raised in Washington D.C. in the summer of 1864 to help defend the capital where regular army units were sent south to support the drive on the Confederate capital of Richmond. On the night President and Mrs. Lincoln were to attend the performance at Ford's Theatre, the theatre management sought additional funds to decorate the state box. Officers of the Treasury Guard regiment loaned three flags to the theatre. Looking up from the stage, this flag was posted on the left side of the state box, and you can see in the Matthew Brady photograph taken two days after the assassination.
3. NMHMLI_090411_021.JPG: Presidential Box at Ford's Theatre: Matthew Brady, April 16, 1865: Photographer Matthew Brady took this photograph two days after President Lincoln's assassination. The theatre box and all its furniture and trappings had been greatly disturbed during the assassination and its aftermath. Brady and the theatre management set everything back into place to re-create the most accurate possible view of the scene, including the original positions of the three colors of the Treasury Guard.
4. NMHMLI_090411_027.JPG: Cuff of Dr. Edward Curtis's sleeve, stained with Lincoln's blood. Envelope that contained the bloodstained cuff. When Dr. Curtis returned home from the autopsy and was changing his clothes, he found a few drops of Lincoln's blood had stained the cuffs of his shirt. His wife cut the cuffs from the shirt and sealed them in this envelope. Dr. Curtis endorsed the envelope with the following: Shirt sleeve soiled with the blood of President Abraham Lincoln at the autopsy on his body April 15, 1865 Edward Curtis, Asst. Surg. USA
5. NMHMLI_090411_036.JPG: Locks of hair removed from Lincoln's head wound: A small amount of hair from the area surrounding Lincoln's wound was removed by Dr. C.H. Liebermann, one of the surgeons in attendance at Lincoln's bedside, and given by him to Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes. Dr. Stone, who was present at the autopsy, presented a lock of hair to Mrs. Lincoln at her request, and to each of the surgeons present at the autopsy.
6. NMHMLI_090411_049.JPG: Lincoln's Last Hour: Charles A. Leale, MD to commemorate the centennial of Lincoln's birth. February, 1909
7. NMHMLI_090411_055.JPG: On the evening of April 14, 1865, between 10:00 pm and 10:30 pm, President Abraham Lincoln was attending a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. The actor John Wilkes Booth entered the state box and fired a single bullet from a Philadelphia Derringer pistol into the back of Lincoln's head. As Booth escaped from the theatre, Dr. Charles A. Leale, an army surgeon, made his way through the audience to Lincoln's box and was the first to reach his side. He found the President in a comatose state with labored breathing and no pulse. He pronounced his prognosis: "His wound is mortal, it is impossible for him to recover." Leale was quickly joined by two other Army doctors, Dr. Charles S. Taft and Dr. Albert F.A. King. They failed to revive the president with brandy and artificial respiration. After Leale probed the wound with his finger and removed a blood clot, Lincoln's breathing became more regular. About fifteen minutes after the incident, the doctors carried Lincoln to Petersen's boarding house located across the street from the theatre. Lincoln's personal physician, Dr. Robert King Stone, as well as several Army physicians, including Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes of the Army Medical Museum, Dr. C. H. Lieberman, Dr. Taft, and Dr. Leale, attended Lincoln until his breathing stopped at 7:20am on April 15th.
8. NMHMLI_090411_060.JPG: Probe used by Surgeon General Joseph Barnes to locate the bullet. Prior to the discovery of x-rays, physicians had difficulty differentiating between bullet and bone within a wound, so a porcelain-tipped probe was used to explore the wound site. If the probe encountered a lead bullet, a mark would appear on the white tip of the probe. At about 2:00am, Surgeon General Barnes introduced a silver probe into the wound, which met an obstruction at a depth of about three inches. He determined that the obstruction was a plug of bone lodged in the path of the ball. The probe passed by the obstruction but was too short to follow the entire track of the wound. He then introduced this long, Nelaton probe that passed into the track of the wound two inches beyond the plug of bone and struck what he believed was the bullet, passed beyond it, and encountered fragments of the orbital bones of the left eye socket. The bullet did not make a mark on the top of the probe. (The probe is missing its porcelain tip.)
9. NMHMLI_090411_077.JPG: Sketch of Abraham Lincoln's death-bed scene. Hermann Faber, Army Medical Museum illustrator April 15, 1865. Immediately after the removal of Lincoln's body, Hermann Faber, a medical artist on duty at the Army Medical Museum, entered the room where the president had died and made a sketch, which he showed to Dr. Woodward who provided details of the position of those present at the time of Lincoln's demise. Drs. Woodward and Barnes approved the accuracy of the sketch. Physicians are identified in the next one.
10. NMHMLI_090411_082.JPG: Persons around Lincoln identified: (1) Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy (2) Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury (3) Dr. Robert King Stone, Lincoln's personal physician (4) Charles Sumner, U.S. Senator (5) Dr. Charles H. Crane, Asst. Surgeon General (6) Dr. Joseph K. Barnes, Surgeon General (7) Henry W. Halleck, Maj. Gen. (8) Edwin McMasters Stanton, Sec. of War
11. NMHMLI_090411_092.JPG: Cuff of Dr. Edward Curtis's sleeve, stained with Lincoln's blood. Envelope that contained the bloodstained cuff. When Dr. Curtis returned home from the autopsy and was changing his clothes, he found a few drops of Lincoln's blood had stained the cuffs of his shirt. His wife cut the cuffs from the shirt and sealed them in this envelope. Dr. Curtis endorsed the envelope with the following: Shirt sleeve soiled with the blood of President Abraham Lincoln at the autopsy on his body April 15, 1865 Edward Curtis, Asst. Surg. USA
12. NMHMLI_090411_098.JPG: Bone fragments from Lincoln's skull: After the autopsy, as Dr. Curtis was cleaning his instruments, he found on one of them a tiny splinter of bone from Lincoln's skull, which had been driven into the brain by the bullet and had adhered to the surgical instrument.
13. NMHMLI_090411_110.JPG: The bullet that took the president's life: This hand-made ball of lead, fired from a Philadelphia Derringer pistol, was removed from Lincoln's brain during the autopsy,.
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Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (DC -- Natl Museum of Health and Medicine (Walter Reed) -- Exhibit: His Wound is Mortal: The Final Hours of President Abraham Lincoln) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2011_DC_NMHMDC_Lincoln: DC -- Natl Museum of Health and Medicine (Walter Reed) -- Exhibit: His Wound is Mortal: The Final Hours of President Abraham Lincoln (19 photos from 2011)
- 2008_DC_NMHMDC_Lincoln: DC -- Natl Museum of Health and Medicine (Walter Reed) -- Exhibit: His Wound is Mortal: The Final Hours of President Abraham Lincoln (1 photo from 2008)
- 2007_DC_NMHMDC_Lincoln: DC -- Natl Museum of Health and Medicine (Walter Reed) -- Exhibit: His Wound is Mortal: The Final Hours of President Abraham Lincoln (2 photos from 2007)
- 2005_DC_NMHMDC_Lincoln: DC -- Natl Museum of Health and Medicine (Walter Reed) -- Exhibit: His Wound is Mortal: The Final Hours of President Abraham Lincoln (6 photos from 2005)
- 1997_DC_NMHMDC_Lincoln: DC -- Natl Museum of Health and Medicine (Walter Reed) -- Exhibit: His Wound is Mortal: The Final Hours of President Abraham Lincoln (6 photos from 1997)
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Military (Non-Events)] [Museums (History)] [Museums (Other)] [National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM)] [Display ALL National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) photos]
2009 photos: Equipment this year: I mostly used the Fuji S100fs. I've also got a Nikon D90 and a newer Fuji -- the S200EHX -- both of which are nice but I still prefer the flexibility of the Fuji. Trips this year: Niagara Falls, NY, New York City, Civil War Trust conferences in Gettysburg, PA and Springfield, IL, and my 4th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including Los Angeles, Yosemite, Death Valley, Kings Canyon, Joshua Tree, etc). Ego strokes: I had a picture of a Lincoln-Obama cupcake sculpture published in Civil War Times and WUSA-9, the local CBS affiliate, ran a quick piece on me. A picture that I took at the annual Abraham Lincoln Symposium appeared in the National Archives' "Prologue" magazine. I became a volunteer with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Number of photos taken this year: 417,000.
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