Medical Sleuths Discuss the Forensics of Death (Lenin, Lincoln, Custer, etc.)

Washington Post ^ | May 6 | Manuel Roig-Franzia

[nickcarraway]

Death never dies here.

It just keeps getting more interesting, more beguiling. More, well, alive. Alive in every cringe-worthy detail, in every clue about its causes, in every shard of evidence waiting to be spliced to another shard . . . and another shard until a picture starts to form, an image assembled from nuggets of information collected decades or centuries ago.

Death, at least for the doctors and history buffs who gather each year at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is the coolest of puzzles, leading them to the coolest of theories. Could Abraham Lincoln have been saved? (Yes.) Was George Custer as much a victim of a personality disorder as the Indians he was fighting? (You betcha.) What turned Florence Nightingale into a recluse? (She might have been bipolar.)

They’ve been at it for 18 years, poring over autopsy records, consulting historical texts and lobbing questions at nationally recognized experts who fly in for an annual conference hosted by the school’s Medical Alumni Association that has turned into a melange of old gore, old guts and old glories. Death might scare you, but to Philip Mackowiak, the professor who dreamed up the conference, mulling human expiration — no matter how ancient — can be “a tremendous amount of fun.” These folks were House way before House was House, but unlike the riddle-solving television doctor, their preoccupation is with the dead rather than the living.

[RedMonqey]

"...speculated that Lenin, even though his health was in precipitous decline because of the strokes, might have been finished off by a poisoning ordered by Joseph Stalin.

Why the need to kill a dying man?
Just look at what stokes did to JFK's father, Joseph P. Kennedy. And nobody's impies he was murdered.


Lenin was well on the way to wearing a wooden suit. Sometimes the facts are just that, the facts. There's no need to "sexy up" the truth.

[gusty]

Custer’s mistake started with his failure to follow Gen. Terry’s orders. He was not supposed to start a general action until Terry and Gibbon’s column approached the Indian village from the north. Custer’s column cut across from the east far north of where he supposed to. Thus he arrived early and from the wrong direction for the planned pincer movement.

[Scoutmaster]

Not the Battle of the Little Big Horn. I'm curious about your outlook on the Washita River. You would call it either the Battle of the Washita River or the Black Kettle Massacre depending on your view. Ostensibly where Custer got his "Son of the Morning Star" sobriquet. 1868.

My ancestor was nowhere near Little Big Horn, but he was a scout for Custer at the Washita River.

[Flag_This]

"To claim an officer has a ‘personality disorder’ because he is an aggressive battle captain is classic media BS. Custer may not have been a nice man according to today's PC mantras but one doesn't become a Major General at age 26 by being a fool or a head case."

The Custer of the Civil War and the Custer of the Indian Wars seems to me to be two very different people. Men who served with him and loved him during the Civil War ended up hating his guts out West. His court martial in 1867 and his abandonment of Maj. Elliot at the Washita come to mind as two examples of actions that seem at odds with the Custer of the Civil War.

Was he a "head case?" Beats me. But when people who had known him for years turned against him that indicates something had definitely changed in the man.

[Flag_This]

"You would call it either the Battle of the Washita River or the Black Kettle Massacre depending on your view."

FWIW, I don't believe Custer had a clue that Black Kettle was anywhere in the area. According to Capt. Albert Barnitz, the cavalry cut a trial identified by their scouts as "hostiles" because it lacked any dog tracks. Apparently dogs did accompany hunting parties, but not war parties.

The cavalry column followed the trail through the night to an indian encampment and set up for their attack in the dark. They attacked at first light, so I doubt they even saw Black Kettle's U.S. flag until it was too late. Black Kettle may have been completely peaceful, but there were other hostile bands up and down the same river. Major Elliot could tell you. I don't for a second believe Custer and Co. deliberately set out to destroy a peaceful band of indians.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks nickcarraway . Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[robowombat]

I misunderstood your question. Why, I don't know. I call it the ‘Battle of the Washita’. There was plenty of fighting and the blow struck did both damage a major group of hostiles due more to killing the horse herd and burning property. Savage warfare as combat against tribal peoples was inadvertently appropriately called in the 19th century inevitably included deaths of numbers of technical non combatants. This was true on the steppes of Central Asia or the dry plains of south Argentina or the expanses of the American West.

[RedMonqey]

Custer’s mistake started with his failure to follow Gen. Terry’s orders.

Yes, Custer made quite a few mistakes but in his defense, sometimes officers must use initiative to take advantage of ever changing battlefield conditions.

The problem this time, Custer misread, disregarded accurate information and proceeded recklessly.

In my humble opinion, he was frustrated by the Indian guerrilla's tactics and believed wrongly this was his best chance to deliver a devastating blow to enemy and regain his glory of his Civil War years and end his career as the soldier who tamed the savage tribes.

Just my thoughts.