Identification of Booth's body

[mikegriffith1]

(10-09-2018 02:43 PM)STS Lincolnite Wrote:  mikegriffith1 stated in a post above:
“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?”

I’m sorry to break it to you Mr. Griffith, but that is just not how scars work from a physiological standpoint.

A scar is essentially an area where tissue (of a more cross-linked, haphazard, fibrotic nature than normal tissue) develops in the area of an incompletely or ineffectively healed wound, burn, lesion, etc. The key here is that a scar is RESULTANT from, and a part of, an active healing process.

While one could burn the tissue, a dead body can’t form a scar of any type because there would and could not be an active healing process. It’s simply impossible.

I take your point that a burn on a corpse will not and cannot begin the healing process. I failed to consider this fact when I discussed the difference between burns and cuts and how they heal.

That being said, there are three points to be made:

One, if Lt. Baker had lightly or moderately burned an area on the back of the neck, it would have left a visible wound but not a deep one. Since the skin was dead, the resulting wound might have somewhat resembled a scar.

Two, it is not necessary to assume that Lt. Baker created the scar that looked like a burn scar. The unfortunate substitute victim might have already had a burn scar on the back of his neck. So when Barnes saw the scar and noticed that it did not look like a surgical scar but like a burn scar, some explaining needed to be done, and the only explanation given--the one floated by Dr. May--is invalid, or at least questionable.

Three, there remains no logical, believable explanation for why the body on the Montauk looked so unlike Booth. "Exposure," "pain," and "stress" over a 10-day period are not going to alter a body's appearance so drastically that none of the facial features resemble the person's living facial appearance. Booth was in Maryland and Virginia in April. I have lived in Virginia for 11 years and lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, until I was 12. In late April the temperatures in the areas he traveled and stayed would have been in the mid-60s to high-70s during the day and in the 40s and 50s at night. He received extra blankets from Cox. He received food and water every day. He spent three nights of those 10 days indoors. The body on the Montauk was examined right around 21 hours after death, hardly enough time--especially in late April in Virginia--for a body to undergo such a drastic change in appearance via decomposition. If Booth's body had been the body on the Montauk that night, Dr. May would have had little trouble recognizing it as his corpse and L. Gardner would have not reported that "everyone" there was so surprised at how the body looked so unlike Booth when they removed the tarp.

(10-09-2018 02:43 PM)STS Lincolnite Wrote:  The questions I quoted above are reminiscent of those often put forward by Otto Eisenschiml. While I think they are posed in good faith, their speculative nature, are in the end, damaging to the practice of history. They end up taking on a life all their own, when a little simple, balanced investigation might render the question itself unnecessary and thereby prevent or at least minimize speculation based inaccuracies and their inevitable propagation.

In other words, just keep seeing the Emperor's New Clothes. Numerous elements of the official conspiracy theory are patently absurd, unbelievable, and internally contradictory. Modern "historical scholarship," dominated by PC ideology and neo-Radical revisionism, summarily dismisses challenges to the official version. But for decades, many scholars did not do so, and the alternative conspiracy theory--that the Radicals were behind the murder--was widely viewed as at least being a plausible explanation.

Eisenschiml's critics have barely laid a glove on the vast majority of his arguments and evidence. Denying and rejecting an argument, and appealing to authority and to the argument's minority status, do not equal refuting an argument. Some the critics' "refutations/debunkings" are downright silly, such as the claim that the Radicals had no reason to kill Lincoln over Reconstruction because Lincoln and the Radicals were not at all far apart on Reconstruction. It is shocking that any "historian" could make this argument with a straight face. I discuss a small amount of the evidence on this point in "Unwanted Evidence":

http://miketgriffith.com/files/unwanted.pdf