'I immediately sent a gentleman for brandy': Long-lost medical report of first doctor to reach Lincoln after he was shot revealed

Report written by doctor who helped Lincoln hours after the president's death in 1865

Dr Charles Leale, 23, was just six weeks into his practice and was 40ft away from Lincoln during performance of 'Our American Cousin'

21-page report details medical procedures used in attempt to save president's life

They were filed away and for nearly 150 years, but now researchers have found the report of the young army surgeon who was first to reach Abraham Lincoln after he was shot in the head in Ford Theatre.

The 21-page report, written by Dr Charles Leale, a 23-year-old doctor just six weeks into his medical practice who happened to be 40 feet from Lincoln, details his original perceptions of the president’s fatal injuries.

The historians who discovered the report in the National Archives in Washington believe it was filed, packed in a box, stored at the archives and not seen for 147 years.

Loss of a president: John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Southern nationalist, shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln during a performance at the Ford's Theatre

Clinical report: Dr Charles Leale, 23, the first to treat Lincoln after he was shot, wrote a detailed report on his treatment hours after the shooting; the documents were recently discovered at the National Archives



Discovery: 147 years after the shooting, a researcher has discovered an original copy of Dr Leale's clinical 21-page report from the night Lincoln was shot

The doctor, who sat 40 feet from Lincoln at Ford's Theatre that night in April 1865, saw John Wilkes Booth jump to the stage, brandishing a dagger, and heard the cry that the 'President has been murdered' before pushing his way through the crowd.



Great Emancipator: Lincoln was shot dead by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in 1865, when Mr Seymour was five years old

Thinking Lincoln had been stabbed, Dr Leale ordered men to cut off the president's coat.

'I commenced to examine his head (as no wound near the shoulder was found) and soon passed my fingers over a large firm clot of blood situated about one inch below the superior curved line of the occipital bone,' Dr Leale reported.

‘The coagula I easily removed and passed the little finger of my left hand through the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball, and found that it had entered the encephalon.'

Dr Leale’s long-lost report also states that he immediately ‘sent a gentleman for brandy and water,’ and that he found the Great Emancipator ‘in a state of general paralysis.’

He describes: ‘His eyes were closed and he was in a profoundly comatose condition, while his breathing was intermittent and exceedingly stertorous.’

A researcher for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, Helena Iles Papaioannou, found it among correspondence of the U.S. surgeon general from April 1865, filed under 'L' for Leale.

'What's fascinating about this report is its immediacy and its clinical, just-the-facts approach,' Daniel Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, told the Associated Press. 'There's not a lot of flowery language, not a lot of emotion.'

Physicians have long debated whether Mr Lincoln could have lived with modern medicine. Trauma treatment was virtually unknown in 1865, and Dr Leale's report illustrates 'the helplessness of the doctors,' Mr Stowell said. 'He doesn't say that but you can feel it.'

Loss of a leader: An artist's rendering that appeared in Harper's Weekly depicts the grisly murder from another angle

Help nearby: Seymour didn't realize the president had been shot, but saw Booth, when he had fallen from the balcony

Dr Leale wrote a report for an 1867 congressional committee investigating the assassination that referenced the earlier account, but no one had ever seen it, said Mr Stowell, whose group's goal is to find every document written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime.

At least four researchers have been painstakingly scouring boxes of documents at the National Archives for more than six years.

They methodically pull boxes of paper - there are millions of documents packed away and never catalogued, Mr Stowell said - and look for 'Lincoln docs,' as Ms Papaioannou called them.

Assassination site: Ford's Theatre, located in Washington, D.C., was playing 'Our American Cousin' on April 14, 1865

Consequences: On July 7, 1865, three men and one woman were hanged in Washington for their parts in the crime: Mrs. Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt

She was assigned the surgeon general's documents and was leafing through letters pitching inventions for better ambulances and advice about feeding soldiers onions to ward off disease when she hit Dr Leale's report.

'I knew it was interesting. What we didn't know was this was novel,' Ms Papaioannou said. 'We didn't know that this was new, that this was an 1865 report and that it likely hadn't been seen before.'

The surgeon never spoke or wrote about his experiences again until 1909 in a speech commemorating the centennial of Lincoln's birth.

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, administered by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, has found and is digitizing 90,000 documents, Mr Stowell said.