A letter from Dr. Leale

[STS Lincolnite]

Was doing an online search this evening for something else entirely and came across this little tidbit. A personal letter from Dr. Charles Leale to a colleague(?) dated May 28, 1865. In it he describes his actions on the night of April 14th - which most of us have seen before in other statements.

The thing that caught my interest was the fact that he stated he had attended the trial of the conspirators...that was new to me. Here is what he said:

"The trial of the conspirators is going on. I went to see them last week at the Court room. They are a very inferior looking set of men Dr. Mudd is the only one that has any intellectual expressions (I hope that if the charges are true against him he will be unable to tell what school he recv'd his Dip[loma] from). They all look as if they did not have any hope. O'Laughlin is very nervous and trembles terribly they are all very pale except the Dr"

Sounds like Dr. Leale hoped that if Dr. Mudd was found guilty it would turn out he was not a real physician. Trying to protect the integrity of his profession I guess.

Here is the weblink which provides pictures of the letter as well as a transcript. Looks like there are some other interesting documents on this site as well that I will explore when I get more time.

http://www.shapell.org/manuscript.aspx?e...assination

[BettyO]

Fascinating, Scott!

Thanks.... very good research - and good site -

[Gene C]

Thanks for sharing this interesting site.
At first glance this one is going to be fun to explore

[LincolnMan]

Scott: thanks for posting this. Interesting comment that Dr. Mudd did not appear "pale"- meaning anxious- I suppose.

[L Verge]

Dr. Mudd probably had the best lawyer of the bunch, but I can't believe that he wasn't scared out of his wits. However, it has always been my impression that the doctor was a rather stoic individual - maybe he knew how to mask his emotions.

We do know that he had a temper, however, as evidenced in the letter that he wrote to an editor of a Catholic newsletter (Brownson?) regarding the problems of society and also several letters that he wrote to his wife from Fort Jefferson where he seems a tad irritated at her for causing him this trouble (or am I reading into that something that really wasn't intentional>)

A question came up years ago when Ed Steers was writing his great book on Mudd: Was taking the Hippocratic Oath part of receiving one's "certification" as a doctor? We always hear supporters say that he was only doing what his Hippocratic Oath required, but had he (or any other doctor of the time) taken that oath?