Civil War Washington

CASE.—Sergeant Albert K——, Co. A, 4th Pennsylvania Cavalry, falling violently upon his head, in April, 1862, in Washington, D. C., had a fracture of the left side of the occipital bone, attended with laceration of the brain. He entered the Judiciary Square Hospital in an insensible condition, with stertorous breathing, dilated pupils, slow pulse, and relaxed sphincters. Cold applications to the head, purgatives, and derivatives, were employed unavailingly. The patient passed into a condition of profound coma, and died April 28th, 1862, from compression of the brain. Acting Assistant Surgeon C. G. Page made the autopsy, and found a partially organized coagulum in the substance of the posterior lobe of the left hemisphere, and in the cavity of the left ventricle. The clot is not recent, and the brain substance in the vicinity is firmly contracted around it. It is of a dark brownish-yellow color, and spongy in texture, and measures one inch in diameter by one-fourth of an inch in thickness. On the surface of the brain there is a more recent clot, black in color, and partially disorganized, measuring nearly the same as the first. The specimen was contributed by Dr. Page to the Army Medical Museum. A view of the clot in the ventricle is given in the accompanying wood-cut, (FIG. 13.)