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 383.—Private William O. Pollard, company C, 44th North Carolina (rebel) volunteers; admitted October 25, 1863. Chronic diarrhœa. Died, November 19th. Autopsy next day: Height five feet ten inches; no rigor mortis. The brain was healthy, and weighed fifty-seven ounces. There were no pleuritic adhesions. The right lung weighed seventeen ounces, the left fifteen; the lower lobes of both were congested hypostatically. The pericardium contained four ounces of fluid. The heart weighed nine ounces; its right cavities contained a large flesh-colored clot, the left cavities a similar but smaller clot; the valves were healthy. The liver weighed fifty-seven ounces; its parenchyma was pale and not very firm, its capsule readily torn; the gall-bladder contained ten drachms of dark-green very viscid bile. The spleen weighed seventeen ounces; it was tolerably firm, and of a dark mahogany-color. The pancreas weighed three ounces. The kidneys were pale and flabby; the right weighed six ounces, the left seven. The large intestine was very much ulcerated, and presented the appearance commonly found in long-existing diarrhœa.—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.