Civil War Washington

Case from the case-book of LINCOLN HOSPITAL, Washington, D. C.; Assistant Surgeon Roberts Bartholow, U. S. A., in charge from August 21st to December, 1863.

CASE 372.—Private Joseph Matthews, company G, 9th New York cavalry; admitted September 12, 1863. Chronic diarrhœa. [This man appears on the register of the regimental hospital of the 9th New York cavalry, admitted September 1st—remittent fever. He is borne on the register of the hospital of the Cavalry corps of the army of the Potomac, admitted September 8th—dysentery—and sent to general hospital September 12th.] Died, September 14th. Autopsy: Height five feet eight inches; apparent age 35. The brain was healthy; it weighed forty-six ounces, and contained little or no fluid. The trachea contained a few masses of tenacious mucus; its mucous membrane was purplish. The right lung weighed nineteen ounces; its upper lobe was much congested; the middle lobe was bound to the thoracic parietes by old adhesions; the left lung weighed thirteen ounces and a half; both lobes were engorged with blood. The heart weighed eight ounces and a half; the right auricle was empty; its lining membrane was dark-red; the right ventricle contained a quantity of venous blood, and a thin fibrinous clot which extended into the pulmonary artery; the left auricle contained a small firm fibrinous clot. The liver was healthy; the gall-bladder was full of yellowish turbid bile. The spleen was firm, and weighed four ounces and a half. The pancreas was pale and firm; it weighed three ounces. The right kidney weighed five ounces; its cortical substance was of an ash-red color and rather flabby; the left kidney weighed four ounces and a half; its cortical substance was of a dark-purple color and firm. The œsophagus, stomach, and small intestine presented nothing abnormal. The mucous membrane of the cæcum and ascending colon was of a dark-green color, and presented a number of large ulcers with ragged excavated borders; in the transverse and descending colon, as far as the sigmoid flexure, the mucous membrane was thickened and covered in many places with a characteristic exudation.—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.