SCIENCE. 



497 



SCIENCE: 



A Weekly Record of Scientific 

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JOHN MICHELS, Editor. 



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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1881. 



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THE REVELATIONS OF THE AUTOPSY HELD 

 ON THE BODY OF THE LATE PRESIDENT. 



The Medical Record of October 8th contains an 

 account by Dr. Bliss, the late President's attending 

 surgeon, of the life history of his illustrious patient, 

 as well as the post mortem observations recorded at 

 the time of the autopsy, and also at a later period, 

 by those who examined the specimens preserved in 

 the Army Medical Museum. 



Inasmuch as the various diagnoses, made during 

 Mr. Garfield's life, as to the location of the bullet, 

 and the injury sustained by various organs, were all 

 of them erroneous, and as the secular and medical 

 journals have already discussed those topics ad 

 nauseam, we shall limit ourselves to a relation of the 

 leading features in the light of the anatomical 

 findings. 



For similar reasons, we shall give no space to a 

 discussion of the views expressed by a physician, who, 

 after incurring considerable ridicule at the hands of 

 the medical profession, and much obloquy at the 

 hands of the public, on account of his sensational 

 experiments on dead bodies, and whose claimed 

 results no doubt misled the eminent surgeons at the 

 President's bed-side, publishes a post mortem diag- 

 nosis of the case in the same issue of the Record. 

 In it he seeks to prove that if the bullet was found 

 in an entirely different locality from the one his ex- 

 periments induced him to surmise, it would, had it 



have gone a little further, infallibly have dropped into 

 a similar situation on the opposite side ! One of the 

 leading medical journals has no other comment to 

 make on this performance, and, as far as we can learn, 

 that comment expresses the general opinion of the 

 medical profession, than to announce that a leading 

 circus company has engaged the services of Dr. 

 Fanueil D. Weisse to repeat his celebrated experi- 

 ments in the course of the programme. 



We subjoin the essential portions of Dr. Bliss' 

 report : — 



The depressed cicatrix of the wound made by the 

 pistol-bullet was recognized over the tenth intercostal 

 space, three and one-half inches to the right of the 

 vertebral spines. A deep linear incision (made in 

 part by the operation of July 24, and extended by 

 that of August 8) occupied a position closely corres- 

 ponding to the upper border of the right twelfth rib. 

 It commenced posteriorly about two inches from the 

 vertebral spines, and extended forward a little more 

 than three inches. At the anterior extremity of this 

 incision there was a deep, nearly square abraded sur- 

 face about an inch across. 



On inspection of the abdominal viscera in situ, the 

 transverse colon was observed to lie a little above the 

 line of the umbilicus. It was firmly adherent to the 

 anterior edge of the liver. The greater omentum 

 covered the intestines pretty thoroughly from the 

 transverse colon almost to the pubes. It was still 

 quite fat, and was very much blackened by venous 

 congestion. On both sides its lateral margins were 

 adherent to the abdominal parietes opposite the 

 eleventh and twelfth ribs. On the left side the ad- 

 hesions were numerous, firm, well organized and 

 probably old. 



These adhesions, and the firm ones on the right 

 side, as well as those of the spleen, possibly date back 

 to an attack of chronic dysentery, from which the pa- 

 tient is said to have suffered during the civil war. On 

 the right side there were a few similar adhesions, and 

 a number of more delicate and probably recent ones. 



A mass of black, coagulated blood covered anjd 

 concealed the spleen and the left margin of the 

 greater omentum. On raising the omentum it was 

 found that this blood-mass extended through the left 

 lumbar and iliac regions and dipped down into the 

 pelvis, in which there was some clotted blood and 

 rather more than a pint of bloody fluid. The blood- 

 coagula having been turned out and collected, meas- 

 ured very nearly a pint. It was now evident that 

 secondary hemorrhage had been the immediate cause 

 of death, but the point from which the blood had 

 escaped was not at once apparent. 



The adhesions between the liver and the transverse 

 colon proved to bound an abcess-cavity between the 

 under-surface of the liver, the transverse colon, and 

 the transverse mesocolon, which involved the gall- 

 bladder, and extended to about the same distance on 

 each side of it, measuring six inches transversely and 

 four inches from before backward. This cavity was 

 lined by a thick pyogenic membrane, which completely 

 replaced the capsule ot that part of the undersurface 

 of the liver occupied by the abscess. It contained 



