JW Booth and Quinine

[L Verge]

I swear that I am going to take a month's leave and immerse myself at the James O. Hall Research Center to find out what has come in that I have missed over the past decade since the library files left the Visitors' Center where our general offices are! I feel like a fool that such files should be right across a parking lot from me, and I don't know what's there... I wish that higher ups would send me a digitizing bunny so that we could meet modern library standards for cataloging.

Good luck with convincing the historical society that they have Josephine confused with someone else.

Southern Maryland had its Doctors' Line for smuggling items to the Confederacy. I would suspect that could include medicines. I don't think Hall et al could ever conclusively prove that Dr. Mudd was part of that Line - except perhaps from the standpoint of smuggling papers and documents. There were other doctors, however, such as Dr. Queen, the elderly contact for Booth who summoned Dr. Mudd to attend Queen's church in November of 1864; Dr. Stoughton Dent (whom I want to know more about); a Dr. Garland, who went South to attend Davis, a Dr. Michael Stone in Aquasco, Dr. Joseph Blandford (who was married to Dr. Mudd's sister and whose house the fugitives rode right past shortly after leaving Surrattsville), several doctors in the village of Piscataway, some more in Bryantown. With the close proximity to Washington, D.C. and its druggists, there are endless possibilities for Booth to obtain needed medicines in just that city alone.