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 391.—Private Samuel Hill, company F, 41st North Carolina (rebel) volunteers; admitted December 5, 1863. Chronic diarrhœa. [This man appears on the hospital register of the Old Capitol prison, taken sick October 28th with typhoid fever.] Died, December 21, 1863. Autopsy twenty-seven hours after death: There was some rigor mortis. The posterior part of the upper lobe of the right lung and the upper portion of the middle lobe were semi-splenified and friable, but did not sink in water; the rest of both lungs was normal. The pericardium contained five drachms of fluid. The heart was normal. The liver and kidneys were congested. The pancreas was whitish and moderately firm. The spleen small and firm. The ileum was very much congested, and presented some punctated ulcers. The large intestine was extensively ulcerated. The mesenteric glands were not enlarged.—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.