Case from the case-book of LINCOLN HOSPITAL, Washington, D. C.; Surgeon J. Cooper McKee, U. S. A., in charge.


CASE 395.—Private Nathan Craft, company K, 53d North Carolina regiment, (Confederate ;) admitted from Old Capitol prison January 6, 1864. Chronic diarrhœa. Died, January 11th. This patient had been sick a long time with the usual symptoms of chronic diarrhœa; toward the close he had pneumonia. Autopsy nine hours after death: The right lung was pneumonified, the left congested and filled with sero-sanguineous fluid. The colon presented the usual lesions of chronic diarrhœa, and the rectum was coated with an exudation of lymph. The abdominal cavity contained a quantity of serum, and a thin layer of lymph united the coils of intestine; the lymph was most abundant upon the colon. The sigmoid flexure was quite firmly adherent posteriorly to the peritoneum. The spleen was very soft, and measured four inches and a half by three.—Assistant Surgeon Harrison Allen, U. S. A.⃰


⃰ September 14, 1864, Dr. Allen presented to the Pathological Society of Philadelphia a brief "Synopsis of Autopsies made at Lincoln General Hospital," to which the reader is referred.—(Proceedings of the Pathological Society of Philadelphia, in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, January, 1865, page 133.) In this paper he analyzes the appearances observed in forty-one cases of diarrhœa and dysentery, thirty-five of fever, twenty-one of pneumonia, and five of diphtheria. The notes of Dr. Allen's autopsies, from which the accounts here presented have been condensed, were not contained in the case-books of Lincoln hospital turned in to the Surgeon General's Office at the close of the war, but have since been copied into them from the originals, loaned for the purpose.