The first doctor to reach President Abraham Lincoln after he was shot in a Washington theater rushed to his ceremonial box and found him paralyzed, comatose and leaning against his wife. Dr. Charles Leale's long-lost report of efforts to help the mortally wounded president, written just hours after his death, was discovered in a box at the National Archives late last month.
The box apparently had not been opened for 147 years. A researcher for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, Helena Iles Papaioannou, found the report among the U.S. surgeon general’s April 1865 correspondence, filed under “L’’ for Leale.
Dr. Charles Leale sat 40 feet from Lincoln at Ford’s Theater that night in April 1865, and saw assassin John Wilkes Booth jump to the stage. He was the first doctor to reach Lincoln's side, only seconds after the gun was fired.
Dr. Leale ordered brandy and water to be brought immediately although modern medical experts question how much that helped.
The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, administered by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, has found and is digitizing 90,000 documents.
You can read more in the Washington Post at http://goo.gl/rdlDM.
My thanks to newsletter reader Larry Head for telling me about this story.