Lincoln's Bloodstained Hair from Wound Found in Basement

[Linda Anderson]

https://wapo.st/3JQJrDI

This is a gift article, actually an opinion piece (with photos!), by Matt Bai from the Washington Post which will be available for 14 days from today. The Post notes, "you are not required to provide an email address or sign in to access the article. Sharing your email address with The Post is optional."

Bai's friend, reporter and editor Ledge King, had inherited not only Lincoln's bloodstained hair but also John Marshall's bladder stones among other artifacts when his godmother, whom he called "Aunt Judy," died in 2006. He kept the boxes in his basement. The boxes included Aunt Judy's ashes along with her parents' ashes.

Ledge King discovered the artifacts last summer when he decided to scatter Aunt Judy's remains in "one of her favorite spots" in New England and went looking for her ashes.

"The only hint as to the provenance of these things — including a lifelike heart made in the 1700s by Abraham Chovet, a French pioneer in anatomical models — was that much of it seemed connected to Caspar Wistar, an 18th century Philadelphia doctor. Wistar wrote the first anatomy textbook in America. His great-nephew Isaac, a lawyer and Civil War general, endowed the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, housing a museum for rare medical artifacts."

Matt Bai goes on to explain how Aunt Judy ended up with the collection.

"At around the same moment in the mid-1950s when Ledge’s mother and Aunt Judy were exploring the cafes of Montmartre, the Wistar Institute was undergoing a remodeling project. It fell to the museum’s curator to inventory its hodgepodge of specimens. You can imagine how relieved he must have been to receive an offer of help from an eager young anatomist, a man named Thomas Haviland — Aunt Judy’s father."

Bai writes, "Holding Lincoln’s plucked hairs in my hand, I felt like a medieval Christian pilgrim who had stumbled on fragments of the True Cross."

The Wistar "now say they are working with an archivist to verify the items." When Bai "called the Mütter Museum and described what we’d found to its executive director, Kate Quinn, she told me flatly: “It’s not anything we’re interested in."

Bai concludes that, "It turns out that our 20th-century interest in gruesome medical curiosities, like so much else, didn’t survive into digital modernity."