The Bullet That Killed Lincoln!!! | History Traveler Episode 15

[Music] [Music] today I am in the state of Maryland just down the road from Bethesda Naval Hospital getting ready to go into the National Museum of Health and medicine now you might think health and medicine that's more and the sciences not necessarily history but there's a lot of history behind this place it was started in 1862 during the Civil War by the Surgeon General at the time and I believe originally it was called the Army Medical Museum and the purpose was to set up an installation where they could collect gather information about battlefield injuries and the effects of artillery and bullets on the human body and things like amputations sounds pretty interesting to be honest this comes highly recommended from a friend of mine that was here I've never been here so we're gonna go inside and check it out and see what they have [Music] so the guy at the front told me that the museum's kind of divided up into anatomy and then also a little bit of like forensics and history so we're gonna hit all of it anyway so we hit the anatomy first and man really interesting right off the bat they have this thing looking at the development of the human skeleton so this is a fetal skeleton at four months Wow seven months eight months this is what a skeleton would look like at birth and see the font sandals there it's commonly referred to as a soft spot that gives the skull the ability to kind of move and form and pass through the birth canal and then you see the progression it closes up interesting this one over here is a child at five years old okay so here's some crazy things from the 1800s that they would use to crack your skull open and something from says 1890 a log and beck drill and burrs oh my gosh that looks primitive but this is kind of cool here this is a 3d printed prosthetic where they would use it to replace a section of your skull that might have to be removed to allow for brain swelling and then they popped that kind of transparent looking prosthetic back into place interesting this is the skull cap of soldier in the Civil War where they were boring a hole in his skull to relieve some cranial pressure and said that this was successful about half of the time and it's nothing new these are pre-columbian skulls and dear heavens they opened up some big ol holes in those skulls that is horrifying okay and this is just a section all about the brain so this right here is a brain that had a ruptured skull the hemorrhage you get over here oh dude sharp-force trauma this is a patient that got stabbed with scissors good heavens yeah and they just got all kinds of brain things here oh my gosh there's one that had an icepick wound to the skull and brain my gosh if you've ever wondered what a gunshot wound does to the brain there you go so here's an entire brain and spinal cord [Music] Wow [Music] ever wonder what elephantitis will do to your leg well well there you go right there that's what it does alright now this is pretty cool this is looking at biomedical engineering more specifically prosthetics and probably what's most interesting to me here is this first one this is called a Drake artificial leg from around 1866 so this would have been something for veterans of the Civil War who had been injured and then this one right here belonged to a guy named Dewey GeForce who stepped on a landmine had his leg blown off and then got this prosthetic leg got it just before his wedding so he was able to walk down the aisle interesting then here's another one this one was made in 1960 very very interesting they got a few more here for the upper extremities some shoulder prosthesis here's another one this is a armoured hand that was made for a guy in World War two his tank got struck by a rocket lost his hand very very interesting all right here's some more prosthetics from the Civil War well that one in particular just looks really uncomfortable Wow and some prosthetic arms again from 1864 for the wounded during the Civil War here's a forearm prosthetic another forearm prosthetic Wow if you've ever heard of boys or girls having cooties well there you go that's a cootie ok so here's kind of an interesting display on disease so in the Civil War yeah there are thousands upon thousands that died most of the people who died died from disease so gangrene things like that and they have all kinds of examples that were collected there's this here's one of a cranium gunshot wound here's a section of femur that got hit by gunshot and then got osteomyelitis which is you can think it was like a bone infection all kinds of interesting pieces here Wow some elbow joint that got hit by a gunshot and then got gangrene whoa these are all hand putative limbs my gosh from gunshot wounds look at that one dear heavens and then here's one that got an infection Wow and then they had the same down here there's more amputated limbs and men look at just what that bone infection did that is crazy huh there's some more down here very very interesting so if you've ever watched the movie glory about the 54th Massachusetts volunteers was an african-american unit that took part in the assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston July 1863 well here is the skull of one of these soldiers that took part in that assault and you can see there's a hole right through the middle of it whether this particular soldier took an artillery round to the head that is insane oh my gosh apparently somebody in the Civil War had the idea to build some body armor but didn't work out so well for him minie balls punched right through it and killed him this is from the Battle of Gettysburg so there was body armor that people tried out during the Civil War but this one unsuccessfully and then down here these are for all bullets that were removed from some poor guy and all down here this collection really really is amazing there's some more Civil War pieces this is from the Battle of Antietam you can see right here where a bullet just grazed the skull and killed this poor guy good grief just unreal okay this is from the Second Battle of Manassas or Second Battle of Bull Run somebody that got shot right above the right eye more wounds to the looks like the femur there's one to the humerus oh my gosh gosh this is just horrifying there's from Gettysburg this hand just looks particularly bad but this might be the worst one I've seen yet as far as a skull in here just look at that oh there's no shot right through the hand at it they had to amputate well this is Vicksburg though Wow Wow Wow hey if you have an arterial bleed rather than using a tourniquet you can use this clamp to stop the arterial bleeding look at that there's a piece of a femur with the mini ball still lodged in it oh here's another here's another fascinating one cranium with the projectile still in it gosh and look what this did insane here's kind of a sad story this is a guy named Peter cluck Lee who had some chronic rheumatism that affected nearly every joint in his body got to the point where her nearly every joint in his body was fused to where he couldn't move that's that's awful okay looking at some different I guess birth defects Wow there's a couple of conjoined twins it's just kind of sad actually I'm not trying to be insensitive but I don't even know what I'm looking at right now here okay apparently that specimen that I just looked at that I couldn't figure out was a fetus with anencephaly okay so this is actually kind of interesting these are two little cloth fragments from a guy named John Kallis that was shot at Gettysburg the bullet blew the cloth fragments into his body and then 18 weeks later his body discharged him Wow so been showing all of this insane stuff it's in this museum what I'm getting ready to show next Trump's at all the this is the absolute coolest thing in the entire museum so April 14th 1865 Lincoln and his wife go to Ford's Theater to catch a play called our American cousin and of course John Wilkes Booth slips up behind him and shoots Lincoln in the back of the head with this bullet right here that is the bullet that was fired out of the derringer that killed Abraham Lincoln Wow not only that these are bone fragments from the skull of Abraham Lincoln and the doctor that treated him was a guy named Edward Curtis these are the sleeve cuffs that he wore on that night stained with Abraham Lincoln's blood and then you come over here this is the probe that was used to locate the bullet and President Lincoln's head wound and then these are locks of Lincoln's hair that were pulled from the headwind my gosh there are a lot of crazy things in here that is definitely at the top unreal okay so that was the National Museum of Health and medicine it might take a few days for my brain to fully process everything that I saw in there it's a small museum but man it is packed with all kinds of interesting things I didn't even show a fraction of what they had in there and of course the the the medical pieces from the assassination of Lincoln were by far the the most interesting that's not to say the other stuff wasn't interesting it was fascinating but horrific educational I don't know there's all kinds of adjectives to describe this Museum it's in Silver Springs Maryland it's free and it is definitely worth the stop I learned a lot today so gonna be in DC for a few days so I've got a whole bunch of videos that are going to be forthcoming from from this little excursion oh I wonder what this could be oh it's a glass Hospital urinal Oh for the love don't break that thing [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 366,949

Rating: 4.8950238 out of 5

Keywords: lincoln, history, history traveler, history underground, washington dc, maryland, museum of health and medicine, medical oddities, gross, head trauma, disease, civil war, wwi, wwii, assassination, travel, learning, jd huitt

Id: AQabZQqIRzY

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 18 2019