The Legend Of John Wilkes Booth

[Houmes]

(02-02-2016 08:44 AM)maharba Wrote:  Very interesting article, thanks Roger. A supposed fibroid tumor removed from the neck, it talks about. I'd seen that before and some similar reference to Boyd. With Booth, seemed like I'd heard it talked of as if a more fleshy, cancerous. Very interesting, fibrous. And that Dr May at first saw no resemblance to JWBooth. And too the whole notion of decapitation. I find it very odd that they kept bones from the body of the man in the barn, the man on crutches who was backshot by the coward and sworn liar "Boston" Corbett. Everything about the handling of the body of the man in the barn was very peculiar. Why go ahead and decapitate, he had no head wound? Was the head of the corpse later presented as Booth, was that the same head which they decapitated from the body of the man murdered in the tobacco barn? What right would the Federals (or the insane Ed Stanton) have to believe they could keep the partial skeleton of "John Wilkes Booth"? If so, why not the head, as well.

This has a simple explanation, for the same reason that the Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC has pieces of President Abraham Lincoln's skull, a section of the vertebrae of President James Garfield, and portions of the spleen, brain, and skeleton of Charles Guiteau (Garfield's assassin). During Guiteau's trial the jury members were allowed to pass around Mr. Garfield's vertebrae to see the bullet wound. Lincoln, Garfield, and Guiteau were all autopsied by pathologists from the Army Medical Museum, at that time a department in the Office of the Surgeon General. Specimens were routinely collected for study and comparison of different injuries and illnesses. Today the museum has over 24 million medical items: pathology specimens, historical medical documents, and old medical instruments.

Incidentally: 1) By definition cancer is always a tumor, but not every tumor is cancer, 2) There is no record of Booth's head being decapitated during his autopsy. More likely, his head separated from the body during normal decomposition, 3) Edwin Stanton was never diagnosed as being insane, and 4) One might call Boston Corbett crude, eccentric, or a religious zealot, but I wouldn't call him a coward. Any Civil War soldier eager to face battle, shouting hosannas as he shot the enemy may have been disturbed, but not a coward.