Passing on, we are arrested by a table surrounded on its outer edge by plaster casts of soldiers who have undergone famous and difficult surgical operations. It is gratifying to know that, if you lose your nose by some other collision beside that of a cannon ball, you can have a new one set on made out of your cheek. The new nose will grow to the root of the old one, and the hole in your cheek will fill up and the scar heal. To be sure it will hurt you frightfully; but you can have a new nose made, and you yourself supply the material. If you don’t believe it, come to the Army Medical Museum and see! Here is the head of the poor fellow with his nose shot off—and here is another with the new nose grown on.
In the centre of the table are some of Vassear’s mounted craniums, purchased for the museum by order of the Surgeon-General. These craniums, with the skeletons in the cases, are mounted after Blanchêne’s method, which allows every portion to be taken apart and put together again. This cranium on the table is as white as crystal; it is mounted on gold, and tiny blue and crimson threads of silk trace from chin to head-top the entire nerve system. It is a work of exquisite art as well as of science, and in no sense repulsive. The glass cases just in the rear contain skeletons mounted by the same method. One is the skeleton of a giant, in life seven feet high, prepared by Auzoax and mounted by Blanchêne’s method. It is as white as snow, and its brass or gold joints (we will call them gold) are bright and flexile. Another, of a child of some six years, shows the entire double sets of first and second teeth. The first, not one tooth gone, and above, in the jaw, the entire row of second teeth ready to push the first ones out.
Amid the thousands of mounted specimens in glass cases, which reveal the freaks of bullets and cannon-shot, we come to one which would scarcely arrest the attention of a casual observer. It is simply three human vertebræ mounted on a stand and numbered 4,086. Beside it hangs a glass phial, marked 4,087, filled with alcohol, in which floats a nebulæ of white matter. The official catalogue contains the following records of these apparently uninteresting specimens:
“No. 4,086.—The third, fourth and fifth cervical vertebræ. A conoidal carbine ball entered the right side, comminuting the base of the right lamina of the fourth vertebræ, fracturing it longitudinally and separating it from the spinous process, at the same time fracturing the fifth through its pedicles, and involving that transverse process. The missile passed directly through the canal, with a slight inclination downward and to the rear, emerging through the left bases of the fourth and fifth laminæ, which are comminuted, and from which fragments were embedded in the muscles of the neck. The bullet, in its course, avoided the large cervical vessels. From a case where death occurred in a few hours after injury, April 26, 1865.”
“No. 4,087.—A portion of the spinal-cord from the cervical region, transversely perforated from right to left by a carbine-bullet, which fractured the laminæ of the fourth and fifth vertebræ. The cord is much torn and is discolored by blood. From a case where death occurred a few hours after injury, April 26, 1865.”
Such are the colorless scientific records of the death wounds of John Wilkes Booth. All that remains of him above the grave finds its perpetual place a few feet above the spot where he shot down his illustrious victim.
It has been recorded elsewhere that the fatal wounds of Wilkes Booth and his victim were strikingly alike. “The balls entered the skull of each at nearly the same spot, but the trifling difference made an immeasurable difference in the sufferings of the two. Mr. Lincoln was unconscious of all pain, while his assassin suffered as exquisite agony as if he had been broken on a wheel.”
In the surgical division which contains the above specimens we find illustrations from living and dead subjects of almost every conceivable fracture by shot and shell.
On a black stand, bearing the number 1,335, we see a strong white bone shattered in the middle. The official statement concerning it is: “The right tibia and fibula comminuted in three shafts by a round shell. Major-General D. E. S., United States Volunteers, Gettysburg, July 2, amputated in the lower third of the thigh by Surgeon T. Sim, United States Volunteers, on the field. Stump healed rapidly, and subject was able to ride in carriage July 16; completely healed, so that he mounted his horse, in September, 1863. Contributed by the subject”—who is General Daniel E. Sickles.
One of the cases in this division is filled with skulls which show gunshot wounds from arrow-heads and thrusts from tomahawks and sabres. One of the latter, No. 970, shows nine savage sabre cuts. It is the skull of an Araucanian Indian, killed by Chilian troops. Near it is the skull of another Indian, riddled by six or seven bullet-shots received from American troops or trappers.