New prognosis for President Lincoln
President Lincoln might have survived if today’s medical technology had existed when he was shot in 1865, but the question is whether he would have recovered enough to return to office, a doctor and a historian said at an annual University of Maryland School of Medicine conference on the deaths of historic figures.
The conference has traditionally reexamined the deaths of historic figures to determine whether the diagnosis of the time was correct, but this year’s event asks whether Lincoln could have been saved and what effect that would have had.
“I don’t believe that the president had a uniformly fatal injury,” said Dr. Thomas Scalea of the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center.
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