The Final Hours

His wound is mortal; it is impossible for him to recover.
Dr. Charles A. Leale
 

On the evening of April 14, 1865, between 10:00 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., President Abraham Lincoln was attending a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. The actor John Wilkes Booth entered the state box and fired a single bullet from a Philadelphia Deringer pistol into the back of Lincoln’s head.

Dr. Charles A. Leale NMHM 0045344

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. Leale was 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 7:20 a.m. on April 15th.

Sketch of Abraham Lincoln’s death-bed scene by Hermann Faber, Army Medical Museum illustrator NMHM 29,719

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.

(From “Lincoln Memorabilia in the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1958 Jan-Feb;32(1): 68-74.) NMHM 29,719

Key:
Sketch of death-bed scene, by Hermann Faber. Persons around Lincoln who can be identified (left to right): 1. Gideon Welles, Sec. of Navy, 2. Salmon P. Chase, Sec. of Treasury, 3. Dr. Robert King Stone, Lincoln’s personal physician, 4. Chas. Sumner, U.S. Senator, 5. Dr. Chas. H. Crane, Asst. Surg. Gen., 6. Dr. Jos. K. Barnes, Surg. Gen., 7. Henry W. Halleck, Maj. Gen., 8. Edwin McMasters Stanton, Sec. of War.

The probe used by Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes to locate the bullet NMHM 613,564

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 2:00 a.m., 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 tip of the probe. (The probe is missing its porcelain tip.)