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

[mikegriffith1]

(08-20-2018 04:20 PM)L Verge Wrote:  

(08-20-2018 02:56 PM)mikegriffith1 Wrote:  Dr. Arnold also argues that the description of the man in the barn's injured ankle could not have been describing the appearance of the kind of injury that Booth had. Dr. Arnold, a retired Navy surgeon and former coroner, contends that there would not have been the described amount of bruising and swelling from an ankle fracture.

Has Dr. Arnold ever treated, or experienced himself, a broken leg bone that has been subjected to twelve days of riding horseback (which included mounting and dismounting); spending a lot of time on the ground, which was cold and damp during April in Southern Maryland; and jostling around in a wagon? Bet not...

It was not 12 days. It was actually slightly less than 10 days. Most of those 10 days he was lying around. He spent three nights indoors. He had ample food for nearly all of his flight. He had people around to help him mount the horse.

There is no way that the bruising and swelling that Dr. May described could have been caused by the ankle fracture described by Dr. Mudd and as a result of Booth's 10 days of flight.

I would imagine that as a Navy surgeon and then as a coroner, Dr. Arnold saw his share of broken limbs.

Quote:The best description that I have ever heard as to how Corbett's pistol shot entered Booth through the back of his neck came from expert researcher, historian, and author Michael W. Kauffman.

Kauffman's discussion on who shot the man in the barn is as superficial and problematic as his discussion (one short paragraph) on the JWB initials. Kauffman doesn't even address the wound ballistics issues and the fact that Dr. Barnes initially identified the bullet as a carbine bullet. He even repeats the myth that the man in the barn raised his weapon and that this was why Corbett shot him, whereas Conger said that he saw the man drop his weapon and start walking toward the door.

Again, Corbett could not have fired the shot because the damage done to the spine was too severe to have been done by a pistol ball. Dr. Arnold discusses this in some detail. Rifle and pistol balls obey the laws of physics, and hence do different kinds and degrees of damage to bone. This explains why Dr. Barnes initially said that the missile was a carbine bullet, and why the card for the specimen identified the missile as a carbine bullet.

As mentioned previously, the track of the bullet was substantially downward, about 25 degrees below horizontal. The markedly downward track for the bullet was first identified by Dr. Barnes, confirmed by the AFIP forensic experts in 1993, and confirmed again by Dr. Arnold.

One big problem with the Lincoln case is that for the last 50 years or so it has been dominated by scholars who have uncritically accepted the military commission's version of events. The "Lincoln assassination research community" has been one giant echo chamber, which has been dedicated to seeing the Emperor's New Clothes and has served to dismiss, ignore, and, on occasion, even scorn scholars who question the military commission's claims too severely. So there's no check and balance, no robust peer review of "scholarly" books on the Lincoln case that toe the military commission's line.

That's how Michael Kauffman's discussions on the the shooting of the man in the barn and on the JWB initials can be described as "expert" and "scholarly" in this echo chamber, when in fact Kauffman's discussions are woefully incomplete, problematic, and misleading--not intentionally, but misleading nonetheless.