"SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — The first doctor to reach President Abraham Lincoln
after he was shot in a Washington theater rushed to his ceremonial box
and found him paralyzed, comatose and leaning against his wife. Dr. Charles Leale ordered brandy and water to be brought immediately.
Leale's long-lost report of
efforts to help the mortally wounded president, written just hours after
his death, was discovered in a box at the National Archives late last
month.
Physicians continue to debate
whether Lincoln received proper treatment. With trauma treatment still
in its infancy, Leale's report illustrates "the helplessness of the
doctors," Stowell said. "He doesn't say that but you can feel it."
"For his time, he did everything
right," said Dr. Blaine Houmes, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, specialist in
emergency medicine who has studied the assassination. Accounts vary
about how Leale did it — Houmes thinks he might have pounded on the
victim's chest — but the doctor resuscitated the president..."
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