Breaking a leg

[SpruceCreekHawk]

(10-01-2014 03:24 PM)Dave Taylor Wrote:  Matthew Canning, Booth's former agent, also claimed to have been present during Dr. May's surgery on Booth. He stated the following to GATH in 1886:

"Somewhere about 1862 I was playing Booth in Washington City, and he began to have a boil on the side of his neck. It grew more and more inflamed, and at last was discernible from the house, and on his fine, youthful skin it made a bad impression. So I said to him one morning: ‘Come here, John, and take a ride with me. It is none of your business where I am going.’ I drove him to the house of Dr. May, a surgeon, and took him in there. May looked at his neck and said: ‘Why, this is a tumor. You will have to submit to an operation to be relieved of it.’ Booth said he would sit right down there and have it cut out. The doctor said to him: ‘Young man, this is no trifling matter. You will have to come when we are ready for you, when I have an assistant here.’

‘No,’ said Booth, ‘You can cut it out right now. Here is Canning, who will be your assistant.’ He threw himself across a chair and leaned his head on the chair-back so as to throw up his neck. ‘Now cut away,’ said he. The doctor told me that if I was to assist in the operation that I must pull back the skin or flesh as he cut. The first wipe he made with his knife nearly made me fall on the floor fainting. The black blood gushed out, and he seemed to have cut the man’s neck partly off. Booth did not move, but his skin turned as white as the wall. The doctor continued to cut, and notified me that I was a remarkable assistant for an amateur. Meantime my stomach was all giving away. The first thing that happened was I rolled over and fell on the floor, and Booth from loss of blood reeled and fell off the chair. When he came to the doctor told me that I was not as much of an assistant as he thought I was going to turn out to be. Booth was laid up for about a month…"

While it appears that Booth passed out from the blood loss, he apparently had a high enough threshold for pain to sit there while May was slicing his neck.

Thanks for posting this. I knew I'd seen it somewhere (Boothiebarn as it turned out) while researching Dr. May for the Tuell murder and remembered it to be more graphic than William May's description. From Canning's account it doesn't seem that Booth drank very much prior to the operation so perhaps his threshold for pain really was quite high.