Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

I think Dr. Barnes’ observation that the scar on the body’s neck looked like a burn could be a significant clue. I think Dr. May recognized that Dr. Barnes’ observation was very problematic for identifying the body as Booth, and that he did what he could to explain the fact that the wound looked like a burn scar and not an incised scar. Dr. Barnes stated that Dr. May told him that the scar looked like a burn scar because the wound had reopened and had healed by granulation instead of adhesion. Dr. May repeated part of this claim in his sworn statement on April 27:

Quote:The scar looks as much like the effect of a burn as the cicatrix [scar] from a surgical operation.

But modern medicine tells us that burn scars look very different from incised scars, as most of us know from our own life experience. The following comes from an article titled “Burn Wound: How It Differs from Other Wounds” on a National Institute of Health website:

Quote:Burns or burn wounds are so much different from other wounds that a separate medical super-speciality has been designated to manage them. . . .

Heat not only damages skin locally but has many generalized effects on the body. These changes are specific to burn injury and are generally not encountered in wounds caused by other injuries.

There is generalized increase in capillary permeability due to heat effect and damage. This causes plasma to leak out from capillaries to interstitial spaces. Increased capillary permeability and resultant plasma leak persists till 48 hours and is maximum in first 8 hours. . . .

This generalized increase in capillary permeability is not seen in any other wound. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3495387/)

The article goes on to note that second-degree superficial burns, such as the type you would get from holding a match flame next to a person’s skin just long enough to create the appearance of a wound, heal in five to seven days and leave virtually no scar:

Quote:Second-degree superficial burns heal from epithelium of hair follicle remnants, which are in plenty in the superficial dermis. Healing is complete within 5-7 days and is almost scar less.

Only severe burns leave large visible scars. Drs. Barnes and May would have known this, which is part of what made Dr. Barnes’ observation so problematic. When Barnes mentioned that the neck scar looked like a burn scar, Dr. May knew he had to either repudiate the scar as one caused by his surgery and face Baker and Eckert’s wrath or come up with an explanation for the scar’s appearance.

We need to keep in mind that Dr. May said that Booth reopened the wound about five days after he performed the surgery, which means the wound had, at the very least, 17 months to heal before May and Barnes saw it on the Montauk. So only a very recent modest/superficial burn would have had any chance of leaving “a large ugly-looking scar,” but even then, there would have been no signs of an incision and no appearance of months of granulation.

There’s no way that an incised wound that healed by granulation, much less by adhesion, would magically produce a scar that looked so obviously like a burn wound that Dr. Barnes felt compelled to mention it—and he not only mentioned it to Dr. May on the Montauk, but he mentioned it again in his testimony at the conspiracy trial. And note that Dr. Barnes was unequivocal in his description: He did not say that the scar “sort of” or “kind of” looked like a burn scar—he said it looked like a burn scar instead of an incised scar:

Quote: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)

Booth’s reopened wound would have had to heal by granulation. Dr. May knew that. After at least 17 months, the scar would have been impossible to distinguish from another granulation scar of similar size. So Dr. May’s claim that he recognized the scar as the one from Booth’s reopened wound is invalid.

Now, let us return to the tattooed initials “JWB” that Charles Dawson said he saw on the body’s left hand. In addition to the fact that nobody else mentioned seeing those initials, there is also the fact that Booth’s sister Asia and the provost marshal general of Baltimore, J. L. McPhail, said that the initials were on the right hand, not the left hand. In fact, McPhail added that there was a small tattooed cross and some tattooed dots on Booth’s left hand—and McPhail pointed this out in a letter to Stanton the day before the autopsy occurred (Official Records, Washington: GPO, 1894, series 1, volume 46, part 3, p. 963). But nobody saw the cross or the dots. Only Dawson said he saw the initials, but he said they were on the left hand. None of the doctors who examined the body said anything about any of these tattoos.

Finally, does anyone else find it to be an amazing, cosmic coincidence that two members of the Montauk’s crew, Charles Collins and William Crowninshield, claimed that they knew Booth and that they had known him for about six weeks? Wow, figure the odds! Just figure the odds that two crew members of the ship where they took the body would happen to have known Booth, and both for about six weeks! Really?