Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

Regarding the argument that Dr. May simply erred when he said that the body’s right leg was the injured leg, does it seem likely that Dr. May would not remember which leg was injured in the most important case of his life, in the crime of the century, in an article that he had ample time to write? When Dr. May’s son, who was also a doctor, was asked about this, he insisted that if his father said the right leg was the injured leg, then the right leg was the injured leg. From Guttridge’s article on the identification and autopsy:

Quote:"The right limb was greatly contused. and perfectly black from a fracture of one of the long bones...."

An old man's memory playing him false? This was suggested more than 30 years later and drew a response from May's son. also a doctor. His father's statements were unfailingly reliable. If he said that the right leg was bruised and discolored. "that would undoubtedly mean that it was the right leg that was broken." (Guttridge, “Identification and Autopsy of John Wilkes Booth: Reexamining the Evidence,” Navy Medicine, January-February 1993, p. 24)

This is not the only problem posed by Dr. May’s description of the leg injury: The injured leg would not have looked the way that Dr. May described it. Dr. Robert Arnold:

Quote:Dr. May described the leg wound as such: “The right lower limb was greatly contused and perfectly black.” The right limb? Someone had forgotten to tell Dr. May that it was the left limb Booth had fractured, and May simply reported what he saw.

Perfectly black? This indicates major soft tissue damage—which would not have been present from a vertical fall such as Booth’s—and not a simple fracture of the malleolus of the distal fibula, which is different than Dr. Mudd’s observation that the wound was a straight fracture with no tumefaction (swelling) and did not regard as a painful or dangerous wound. A fracture of this nature is not perfectly black unless there is associated soft tissue damage. There was never any attempt to explain these discrepancies; they were simply ignored. (The Conspiracy Between John Wilkes Booth and the Union Army to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln, 2016, pp. 259-260)

Let us return to the neck scar that Dr. May used as his basis for identifying the body as Booth: Interestingly, Dr. Barnes said the wound looked like a wound from a burn, not from an incision, but he claimed that Dr. May told him that this was because the wound was torn open on the stage when it was nearly healed:

Quote:Q. Describe to the Court the scar which is alleged to have been on his neck.
A. The scar on the left side of the neck was occasioned by an operation performed by Dr. May, of this city, for the removal of a tumor, some months previously to Booth’s death.
Q. What was its peculiar appearance, if it had any peculiar appearance?
A. It looked like the scar of a burn, instead of an incision. . . . (The Conspiracy Trial for the Murder of the President, Ben Poore transcript, volume 2, p. 61)

A scar from a burn? Could this be one of the reasons that Lt. Baker took off with the body and kept it for some three hours—to burn a scar onto the back of the neck?

Now, Dr. Barnes sought to explain the fact that the scar looked like a burn and not an incision scar: He said that Dr. May told him that it looked like a burn scar because the wound had reopened on the stage when it was nearly healed:

Quote:It looked like the scar of a burn, instead of an incision; which Dr. May explained, from the fact that the wound was torn open on the stage, when nearly healed. (p. 61)

In his report, Barnes said that Dr. May stated that the reopening of the wound left a large scar formed by granulation (Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 318-319) Dr. May said the same thing at the John Surratt trial (The Trial of John H. Surratt, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1867, volume 1, pp. 270-272).

A few points need to be made:

One, when Dr. May testified just two years later in the John Surratt trial, he described the first surgery, the reopened wound, and the second surgery, and he said nothing about the scar looking like a burn. Rather, he described it as a scar made by an incision that had reopened and that was closed again with granulation instead of adhesion (The Trial of John H. Surratt, volume 1, pp. 270-272). He did not say one word about the scar looking like a burn.

Two, since when does re-repairing a wound that was nearly healed cause the wound to look like a burn instead of an incision? How does that work?

Three, the fact that Barnes said that Dr. May said the scar formed by granulation refutes Michael Kauffman’s attempt to turn Barnes’ statement into evidence for Dr. May’s identification. Says Kauffman,

Quote:Booth had torn it open before it had a chance to heal, and the scar looked more like a burn, than the work of a surgeon, which made it distinctive. (American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies, Random House, 2004, p. 323)

But this will not work. As Dr. Arnold notes, scars formed by granulation are impossible to distinguish from each other. Far from making the scar unique, granulation would make the scar impossible to distinguish from other scars formed by granulation. (Furthermore, Barnes said that Dr. May told him that the scar was reopened when it was nearly healed, not merely “before it had a chance to heal.”)

Four, there’s yet another problem: Dr. May was not the only doctor who operated on the back of Booth’s neck. Booth’s sister stated that on one occasion when John Wilkes came home, a Quaker doctor “lanced a great carbuncle on his neck” and that he “suffered much” from it (Asia Booth Clarke, John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir, edited by Terry Alford, University Press of Mississippi, 1996, pp. 84-85).

This surgery was done after Dr. May’s surgery. Unless the carbuncle happened to be in the same location as the tumor that Dr. May removed, and unless the Quaker doctor operated inside the scar left by Dr. May, there should have been two scars on the neck of the body examined on the Montauk, IF the body was Booth.