Robert Arnold's Book The Conspiracy Between John Wilkes Booth and the Union Army

[Steve]

Here's a link to the page of Dr. Arnold's book specifically about the type of weapon/bullet used:

https://books.google.com/books?id=9Ga_DA...22&f=false

On the page just prior to where the link opens, Arnold cites Leonard Guttridge's Jan. 1993 Navy Medicine article as his source for this information, here's a link to that article:

http://library.indstate.edu/rbsc/neff/PD...cation.pdf

The "rifle bullet" description Mike is referring to comes from the catalogue reference written for Booth's vertebrae for the Army Medical Museum in 1866. (Guttridge p. 23) That's a year after the assassination and the conspirator's trial! If Surgeon General Barnes believed the wound was made by a carbine and not Corbett's pistol, he sure didn't give any indication of that. The actual wording used for the catalogue was "a conoidal carbine bullet entered the right side". Which was later corrected to "a conoidal pistol ball entered the right side". Nothing about this chronology suggests anything other than an error in wording for the description of a museum piece that was later corrected.

Here's a Boothie Barn article on the vertebrae:

https://boothiebarn.com/2014/06/27/john-...vertebrae/