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 385.—Private Joseph Gerrold, company E, 10th Vermont volunteers; admitted November 23, 1863. Chronic diarrhœa. Died, November 29th. Autopsy: Height five feet eight inches; rigor mortis slight; body emaciated. The brain was healthy, and weighed forty-seven ounces; the ventricles contained two drachms of fluid. The epiglottis had a yellowish-pink color. The mucous membrane of the larynx was of a bluish cast; that of the trachea was purplish over the interspaces, whitish over the rings. The right lung weighed twenty-one ounces; the posterior portion of its upper and lower lobes was congested, the rest of the lung healthy; the left lung weighed twenty-four ounces; it was intensely congested, and the central portion of the base of its upper lobe was in the stage of red hepatization. The pericardium contained a drachm of bloody fluid. The heart and its valves were healthy; there was a large whitish clot in its right side extending into the pulmonary artery; in the left side there was a smaller clot of the same character. The liver was congested; the gall-bladder contained four drachms of slightly viscid brown-red bile. The spleen was seven inches long, by five and a quarter wide and three and a half thick; it had a dark purplish mahogany-color, and was very firm. The kidneys were pale, the left being paler than the right; the right kidney weighed six ounces, the left five and a half. The pancreas weighed two ounces. The small intestine was extremely congested; large intestine the same; the mucous membrane of the large intestine was of a dark-greenish color. The diagnosis recorded in this case was chronic diarrhœa, but none of the characteristic lesions of that disease were found. There was no ulceration, no intumescence of the solitary glands, &c. The patient died most probably of pneumonia.—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.