Oh, the trouble a seeming typo can cause.
In an earlier post this week, I wrote about an upcoming seminar that will tackle the question of whether Abraham Lincoln could have survived his head wound if he'd had access to modern emergency care.
Dr. Philip Mackowiak, chief of the medical service at VA Maryland Health Care System and organizer of the annual Historical Clinicopathological Conference, said a trauma chief would confirm that Lincoln would have survived.
But that wouldn't have been the whole story:
Since the whole left side of his brain was blown away by thismini-ball, what he's going to say is that he would have saved his life,
but [Lincoln] would have been severely incapacitated mentally.
It didn't take long before commenters began suggesting that the properterm is Minié ball," a term for a kind of bullet, not "mini-ball." Butothers said the bullet in Lincoln's head was certainly not a Minié
So which was it? I checked with Mackowiak, who clarified matters (and confirmed that I'd transcribed him correctly):
I was referring to a “mini-ball," not a "Minié ball," which is a riflebullet with a conical head used in muzzle-loading firearms and inventedby Claude Etienne Minié. The former is simply a “small ball” –
terminology consistent with the notes of Dr. Robert King Stone, thepresident’s family physician, who described the projectile found in theLincoln’s brain as a “ball” (JAMA 1965; 193: 99-100).
[JAMA is the Journal of the American Medical Association.]
So now that we hopefully have that cleared up, there's one more gunissue. In another post,
I asked whether there was a modern equivalent of the .44 caliberone-shot pistol used by John Wilkes Booth to shoot Lincoln.
Commenter"Chrontius" said yes:
… similar pistols in all flavors are available onthe open market today, ranging from the latest modern designs, two-shotbreakopens in many popular calibers including magnum revolver,
automatic pistol, and even a small shotgun cartridge, to those designslike the one used to kill Lincoln down to the black powder and patchedlead ball fired.
"Maurs" had this to say:
You could probably purchase or produce an exact replica of Booth'sweapon - but it is extremely unlikely that anyone seriously intendingto kill a president would choose a weapon like that. There are manymodern firearms that would be cheaper and more effective.
Thanks to all the commenters. The photo, by the way, is of the actual Booth pistol.