Decapitation of the Union

[L Verge]

While I wasted time searching for the comments about Mr. Lincoln's physique in items related to his autopsy, I should have gone immediately to Kathy Canavan's great book, Lincoln's Final Hours. I was searching for the wrong doctors' comments.

On page 102, Kathy writes: "Each time they turned down the sheets, they revealed a brawny chest and the immensely muscular arms expected of a much younger man, in unbelievably perfect proportions. Several visitors gasped in surprise the first time they saw the doctors turn down the covers. It was hard to believe the president was in the sixty-second day of his fifty-seventh year. Mr. Lincoln had the perfect male body. There was not a single flaw in any part. Dr. Leale said he could have been the model for Michelangelo's Moses, possessing the same massive grandeur."

She cites Field's Memories of Many Men and of Some Women, p. 324, and Dr. Charles Leale, quoted in an unidentified article in the NPS files and used in Twenty Days by the Kunhardts, p.49.

We need to keep reminding ourselves that Woodward, Curtis, and Stone (those who performed the autopsy on Lincoln at the White House) were intent on documenting the death wound to the head -- not the rest of the President's body.