doctors at lincoln's bedside

[Linda Anderson]

(02-14-2015 12:48 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Linda Anderson is our Seward expert... There were at least several others, I believe, over the course of Seward's treatment, but Linda is much better on the Seward subject than anyone I know.

Thank you, Laurie. I checked Fanny's diary and she mentions the doctors in attendance on assassination night. There was also Dr. Thomas Gunning, the dentist who designed Seward's mouth splint. There may have been other physicians as well who attended Seward during his recovery.The descriptions are from Sensitivity and Civil War: The Collected Diaries and Papers, 1858-1866, of Frances Adeline (Fanny) Seward by Patricia Carley Johnson.

Dr. T. S. Verdi - "was a Washington homeopath who was employed as the Sewards' family physician."
Dr. Joseph K. Barnes - Surgeon General
Dr. Basil Norris - "was promoted to Major and Surgeon, April 16, 1862."
Dr. William Monroe Nottson [sic] (Dr. Norris's assistant)- Dr. Notson "entered the Union Army as an Assistant Surgeon in 1862."
Dr. John Wilson - promoted to Surgeon in in the Volunteer Army in Dec . 1862 "and in August 1863 he was made a Lieut. Colonel and Medical Inspector."
Dr. William Whelan - Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery of the Navy Department.
Dr. White - Unidentified

"But for Surgeon-General Joseph Barnes, an prominent allopathic surgeon who came to assist in Seward's treatment, the incident nearly turned into a professional disaster as the American Medical Association (AMA) seriously considered censuring him for consulting with a quack, which they deemed Verdi to be. The AMA stopped short of this step only due to fear of public condemnation."

A Century of Homeopaths: Their Influence on Medicine and Health By Jonathan Davidson

https://books.google.com/books?id=SvG7BA...es&f=false

Here's an interesting letter to the editor of the New York Times, June 29, 1865.

"Much surprise has been occasioned by a statement, under the telegraphic head of the 27th, that in the late convention of the American Medical Association, held in Boston, Surgeon-General BARNES was held to account, and narrowly escaped expulsion, for 'unprofessional conduct in consulting with, an irregular practitioner in the case of the SEWARDS.' In other words, the Surgeon-General was denounced for acting as a gentleman and a man of sense. The 'charges' were based upon the following paragraph, published from a letter written by Dr. VERDI, Mr. SEWARD's family physician, shortly after the occurrence of that terrible assault:

"'Surgeon-Gen. BARNES, Drs. NORRIS, U.S.A., and WILSON, Medical Inspector, were sent to my assistance, and I must say to their honor, that their energies united with mine only to save and relieve the victims, and not one descended to that petty professional pique or ill-conceived pride of many practitioners in reference to associating with a medical gentleman of a different school of Therapeutics. Our intercourse, professional and social, has been mutually courteous; we met on the same field inspired by the same ambition, to work together for the name end.'

"In the convention the Surgeon-General was censured for meeting Dr. VERDI in that arena of woe and alarm, without protesting against his presence, without ordering him out of the room, nay without forgetting the national calamity, the momentous and perilous condition of several members of that unfortunate family, to descend to professional intolerance and bigotry, and make an issue of discord with the Doctor himself who, after all, was the regular family physician, at his post, faithful in the discharge of his duties."

http://www.nytimes.com/1865/07/09/news/p...rance.html