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, then Surgeon J. Cooper McKee, U. S. A., in charge.

CASE 394.—Private F. Lehman, 39th company, 2d battalion Invalid Corps; admitted November 11, 1863. Chronic diarrhœa. Died, January 10, 1864. This man had been wounded in action before being transferred to the Veteran Reserve Corps. The ball entered his left shoulder, between the acromion and the head of the humerus. It was found, after death, embedded immediately beneath the skin an inch below the spine of the scapula. Autopsy: The liver was soft and friable. The spleen measured four inches and a quarter by three; it was soft and of a pale-red color. The intestines presented the usual lesions of chronic diarrhœa. The cæcum was greatly thickened and inflamed. The peritoneal surface of the colon was inflamed and coated with thick adhesive lymph.—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.