A Finger in Lincoln's Brain

What Modern Science Reveals about Lincoln, His Assassination, and Its Aftermath

E. Lawrence Abel

• Publisher: Praeger
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781440831188
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216084709
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This intriguing book examines Lincoln's assassination from a behavioral and medical sciences perspective, providing new insights into everything from ballistics and forensics to the medical intervention to save his life, the autopsy results, his compromised embalming, and the final odyssey of his bodily remains.

In this book, E. Lawrence Abel sheds much-needed light on the fascinating details surrounding the death of Abraham Lincoln, including John Wilkes Booth's illness that turned him into an assassin, the medical treatment the president is alleged to have received after he was shot, and the significance of his funeral for the American public. The author provides an in-depth analysis of the science behind the assassination, a discussion of the medical care Lincoln received at the time he was shot and the treatment he would have received if he were shot today, and the impact of his death on his contemporaries and the American public.

The book examines Lincoln's fatalism and his unbridled ambition in terms of empirical psychological science rather than the fanciful psychoanalytical explanations that often characterize Lincoln psychohistories. The medical chapters challenge the long-standing description of Lincoln's last hours and examine the debate about whether Lincoln's doctors inadvertently doomed him.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Target on His Back
• 2 A Fever in the Blood
• 3 For Want of a Nail
• 4 A Lucky Shot?
• 5 A Story Too Good to Fact Check
• 6 Deathbed Vigil
• 7 We Traced the Wound
• 8 Ballistics: The Science of Lincoln’s Gunshot Wound
• 9 Did Lincoln’s Doctors Doom Him?
• 10 Embalming Lincoln
• 11 We Mourn a Father Slain
• 12 The Politics of Death
• 13 Binding Up the Nation’s Wounds
• 14 Death Will Not Be Cheated
• 15 “Now He Belongs to the Ages”
• 16 There Will Be Blood
• 17 “Not So Black and Shiney as It Was Long Ago”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index