Booth lived?

[Ol Gabe]

Pards & Pardettes, All,
Read the following article today, April 28, '08, and found it of interest. Thought you all might as well. I have no opinion, just simply passing on a historical and observational conjecture from the modern media.
Best regards and good reading!
'Ol Gabe
...
John Wilkes Booth relatives unconvinced

Apr. 25, 2008 05:36 PM
Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA - Sometime after 2 a.m. on a cool, cloudy Wednesday, a group of detectives and blue-clad troopers cornered a murderous fugitive in a tobacco barn on the Garrett family farm near Port Royal, Va.

"Draw up your men before the door and I'll come out and fight the whole command," called a voice from the barn. "Well, my brave boys, prepare a stretcher for me!"

A soldier lit a tuft of hay, threw it inside and spied the silhouette of a man on crutches, a carbine on his hip.

"Pop! A shot was fired and, 143 years ago Saturday, John Wilkes Booth - assassin of Abraham Lincoln - collapsed to the ground, mortally wounded in the neck.

That's what history says.

But two Booth family descendants - Joanne Hulme of Philadelphia, and her sister, Virginia Kline of Warminster, Pa. - aren't convinced.

They think that another man was killed and that Booth, who they believe was the president's assassin, lived to a ripe old age.

Aided by Booth historians, researchers and scientists, the sisters may now be on the threshold of proving their theory through DNA tests.

Why not compare DNA from Booth family members to genetic material from the man in the barn, contained in specimens at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia and National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington?

And how about checking those museum specimens against DNA in the hair of the assassin's brother, actor Edwin Booth, which is preserved at the Players, a New York theatrical club?

Depending on the specimens' condition, DNA experts confirmed this week that it is possible to get the answers sought by the family.

"Since I was a girl, I've been told that he escaped," said Hulme, 58, recalling Booth family lore.

"I want to know for sure who was in the barn," added Kline, 48.

The sisters' belief is shared by Booth researcher and educator Nate Orlowek, of Silver Spring, Md.; historian Jan Herman, editor-in-chief of Navy Medicine, the Navy's official medical journal; author and historian Leonard F. Guttridge, of Alexandria, Va.; Booth buff Ken Hawkes Jr., former autopsy assistant at the Regional Forensic Center in Memphis, and others.

"I've been studying this since I was 15 years old," said Orlowek, 50, who is leading the "false Booth" research effort and helping to prepare a request for the specimen in Washington.

"It's one thing if historians want to disagree with us, but it's hubris to say that it's impossible (we're) right. What kind of historian is that?"

"It's not too late to set the record straight," added Herman. "This is not a minor footnote in history."

Most experts "have a vested interest in keeping the standard story unchanged ... but I'm convinced it wasn't Booth" at the barn, said Guttridge, coauthor of Dark Union: The Secret Web of Profiteers, Politicians, and Booth Conspirators That Led to Lincoln's Death.

Booth's present-day pursuers are not discouraged by esteemed Civil War scholars who dismiss as irrational the escape theory and tales of Booth's mummified body on display in carnivals. Orlowek and his followers hope to convince them by matching the museum specimens' mitochondrial DNA with DNA from Booth's descendants or from Edwin Booth's hair and saliva residue on his old smoking pipes.

"Anytime anyone official wants to take a look (at the Edwin Booth specimens), they are more than welcome," said John Martello, executive director of the Players, founded by the assassin's brother.

At the National Museum of Health and Medicine, which has three cervical vertebrae from the area of the gunshot wound, a panel judges specimen requests based on the inquiry's merit.

Among the criteria are social, legal and ethical implications of the research, said Timothy Clarke Jr., a spokesman for the museum, located on the campus of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He could not say how long it would take to consider a Booth request.

The Mutter Museum, which has cervical tissue from the alleged Booth, said that the specimen's DNA has degraded from being stored in formaldehyde and alcohol.

"The good news is that science is evolving and expanding everyday," said Anna Dhody, Mutter curator. "Maybe years from now, even embalmed specimens will be tested for DNA."

John Wilkes Booth would have loved this drama.

He was the matinee idol of his time, a dashing Shakespearean actor who, with his brothers Edwin and Junius, performed in Philadelphia, New York and Washington.

But on the night of April 14, 1865, after firing a .44 caliber bullet into the brain of Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington, Booth took on a new role: fugitive.

"I have too great a soul to die like a criminal," Booth wrote in his diary in southern Maryland. "Oh! May He spare me that and let me die bravely."

Countless historians say the assassin gave his final performance at the Garrett barn. Hulme and Kline heard a different story.

"The first story my mother ever told me was that John Wilkes Booth was not killed in the barn," Hulme said.

The soldiers' victim was James William Boyd or John William Boyd, who bore a striking resemblance to the assassin and was sought for the murder of a Union captain by some accounts.

"He was shorter than Booth and had red hair" instead of the actor's black wavy locks, Hulme said.

Her mother, Virginia Eleanor Humbrecht Kline of Warminster, was one of more than a dozen descendants who gave permission to open the Booth burial plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore in 1995.

They wanted to check the remains for identifying marks - a broken left leg and crushed right thumb - and to use photo superimposition, a technique that would have attempted to match the skull to photos of Booth.

But a judge turned down the family and Orlowek after learning that Booth had been interred at an undisclosed location in the cemetery to prevent desecration of his grave.

That left DNA as the only option for the descendants and Orlowek, whose research will be featured on TV's Unsolved Mysteries in the fall.

A minuscule bit of the Washington museum's specimen - the size of a match head - would be enough to get DNA, said researcher Ken Hawkes.

"The specimen is sitting there in the National Museum of Health and Medicine, just sitting there," said Hawkes.

Added Hulme, "I just want the truth."

[Captain Lee Bishop]

This pops up every few years, just like the story of Billy the Kid living into the 1950s...

[Ol Gabe]

C.L.B., Sir,
Thanks for mentioning it comes up every so often, hadn't seen it before yesterday.
Today, 4/29/'08, the following article giving another tack on Lincoln appeared, interesting from a different medical perspective. Again, I have no opinion one way or the other.
Best regards and good reading!
'Ol Gabe
...
Was Lincoln Already Dying When He Got Shot?

Posted on: Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 00:00 CDT

By Lisa M. Krieger

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Did John Wilkes Booth shoot a dying man?

That's the controversial conclusion reached by physician and amateur historian Dr. John Sotos, who says that President Abraham Lincoln was suffering from a lethal genetic cancer syndrome when he was shot at Ford's Theatre 143 years ago.

"Lincoln was a rare man with a rare disease," said Sotos. He has self-published a 300-page book and 400-page database to support his conclusion, based on an exhaustive analysis of Lincoln photographs and historical eyewitness descriptions of the president's health. "This solves a puzzle."

While most Americans only reflect on dead presidents during long weekends in February, Sotos and other physician historians pore over ancient accounts of long-gone symptoms, studying aches and pains as if the patient had stepped out of the grave into the clinic.

These hobbyists have crafted a collection of retrospective diagnoses: George Washington might have suffered dementia during his last years in office; James Madison suffered seizures; Calvin Coolidge grew depressed after the death of his son; after a lifetime of heavy drinking, Franklin Pierce died of cirrhosis of the liver.

Lincoln's health has fascinated medical sleuths. In 1962, it was suggested that his great height and long limbs were linked to a genetic disorder called Marfan syndrome. Others have proposed alternate ailments - Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, perhaps, or Stickler syndrome. Some say he suffered from depression or exhaustion.

The late president's health had long puzzled Sotos.

Last year, while assembling a medical database about the 16th president, Sotos read an unrelated article about thyroid cancer, the deadly and inevitable outcome of multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2B, or MEN 2B.

Many of the symptoms matched Lincoln's, and at 3:15 a.m., Sotos made a link. The condition, which causes aggressive thyroid cancer, explains Lincoln's lanky build, chronic constipation, hooded eyes, asymmetric jaw and the lumps on his lips, he said. His health was weakening in the months prior to the assassination, Sotos asserts.

If true, Lincoln's death could have been messy and lingering, Sotos speculates, not sudden and shocking. For a nation in post-war turmoil, "it would have been a much different ending."

The medical community is divided on the theory.

"Sotos has presented a very compelling case," said Dr. Charis Eng, director of the Genomic Medicine Institute of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. "It is fascinating, but the jury is still out."

More skeptical is Dr. Jeffrey F. Moley, an expert on the disease at Washington University in St. Louis. "I strongly doubt that Lincoln had MEN 2B. I have seen a hundred patients with MEN 2B and I see none of the characteristic features. It's very, very unlikely."

This isn't the first president Sotos has diagnosed, living or dead.

He's compiled meticulous medical histories on all 43 U.S. presidents - as well as Vice President Dick Cheney ("a vasculopath with an almost 30-year history of coronary atherosclerosis.") He diagnosed severe sleep apnea in William Taft and graphed the president's weight gains and losses.

Other projects include a "Periodic Table of the Senators," where legislators are arranged horizontally from the liberal left to the conservative right, in shades of blue and red. He's compiled biographies of every NASA astronaut and designed an online calculator that weighs the risk of mad cow disease vs. heart attack.

A cardiologist, colonel and chief flight surgeon in the California Air National Guard, Sotos also is a medical consultant to the TV show "House, M.D." and has founded the company Apneos, which builds devices to treat sleep apnea.

"I enjoy peeling back the boundaries of my ignorance," he said. His interests are so vast that Sotos earned his math degree from Dartmouth and a medical degree from Johns Hopkins before coming to Palo Alto to study artificial intelligence at Stanford.

Unmarried, the 50-year-old surrounds himself with rich friendships. An insatiable reader, Sotos walks the Stanford "Dish" trail two hours a day - nose in a book.

"It's paved. Except for the time I stepped on a snake, it's completely safe."

Longtime friend and former Johns Hopkins colleague Dr. Hugh Rienhoff calls him "a polymath - a fascinating character who works completely outside the system, adapting to whatever the problem is and moving with ease, rather than being straitjacketed.

"When he focuses, he becomes consumed - which lets him get to the level of granularity that he does," he said. "Once he puts his mind on something, he gets down to bedrock."

Only a DNA sample will prove if Lincoln might have soon died a natural death had Booth lost his nerve. That sample won't come from Lincoln; he's buried in concrete. It won't come from his living descendants; there are none. Only a precious sample of blood, from a saved swath of soiled fabric, would be definitive.

Until then, history offers the best clues.

"Physicians have an obligation to investigate everything that may shed light on their patient's health," said Sotos. "I have simply approached Lincoln as if he were my patient."

Information on Sotos' book can be found at www.physical-lincoln.com

Source: Charleston Gazette, The

[Trailrider]

Absent any proof one way or another, there's no way to say whether John Wilkes Booth escaped or died outside the burning barn.  Certainly, the good doctor and the Booth descendents are welcome to continue their research.

However, ambiguities surrounding historical events will always give folks grist for their mill, or at least food for thought.  Who killed JFK?  Was there a conspiracy?  Did Lincoln have Marfan's or thyroid cancer or whatever?  For that matter, was JFK a lot sicker with Addison's Disease than anyone realized?  Did President Warren G. Harding die of a heart attack...or was he poisoned by his jealous wife?  Did FDR really know the Japanese were about to bomb Pearl Harbor?  Is Elvis really dead? (I was down at the corner grocery store, and the man in the checkout line ahead of me dropped his wallet.  I handed it back to him, and he said, "Thank ya! Thank ya very much!"    Ezekiel saw a wheel, way up in the middle of the air!  What was that wheel he said he saw?  A UFO?

At least we know (maybe) that's Jesse in "Mr. Howard's" grave!

Interesting, if true...but interesting!

[Pitspitr]

You forgot about JFK being still alive and living on a remote tropical island because he's paralyzed and embarased by his physical appearance. 

[Ol Gabe]

"You forgot about JFK being still alive and living on a remote tropical island because he's paralyzed and embarased by his physical appearance."
Now there is one I hadn't read in the grocery store checkout line, HAH!
All kidding aside, it is always fun to read a new take on an old 'established' bit of history. New pieces of the puzzle pop up every so often and help fill in the gaps. Are they right or wrong? Only time and continued research will tell. At the turn of the last century scientists said no more species of animals would ever be discovered, yet we see new documented species appear almost weekly in places we thought they couldn't possible hide in, so there is still hope that some bit of a letter, photo or other item will come out of a closet or private collection and solve the mystery, or not.
Best regards and keep on looking!
'Ol Gabe

[Major 2]

"...the grocery store checkout line, HAH! "

My favorite was the B-17 Flying Fortress that landed on the MOON...complete with PHOTO !