Trivial Trivia - taking trivia to new levels

[RJNorton]

Laurie, I originally had it listed as a piece of thoracic tissue on my website, but in 2002 I received the following message from the late Gretchen Worden:

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"My attention was just drawn to your website, and I have one small correction to make. We now believe that the piece of John Wilkes Booth in the Mutter Museum was not from his thorax (though that is what was on the original label), but tissue possibly cleaned off the cervical vertebrae when they were prepared for the Army Medical Museum, now the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

The reasons why we think this may be so are: 1) an X-ray examination of the tissue showed that there are fragments of bone in the specimen that may have been from the shattered vertebrae, and there is also a single black hair in the bottle; 2) the post mortem examination of Booth seemed to focus on the area of bullet damage and the broken leg, rather than being a complete autopsy in the traditional sense, and it seemed unlikely that tissue would have been taken from his chest since there is no evidence that it was part of the post mortem.

I wrote this up in an article called "Is It The Body Of John Wilkes Booth?", published in the Transactions & Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1994. I would be glad to send you a copy if you like."

Gretchen Worden, Director
Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
19 South 22nd Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103-3097