Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/62

BACKGROUND AND BEGINNINGS Despite the frustrating delays of overcast weather and the vagaries of passing clouds even on sunny days and determined to make the "process wholly independent of the weather," experiments were undertaken in 1869, using electric lights and magnesium lamps (fig. 17), such as were used for "magic lantern" lectures. Both proved successful, but the electric light was superior. In fact, Woodward reported to The Surgeon General on 5 January 1870, that an electric lamp, powered by a 50-unit battery, gave better results with less trouble than sunlight, and claimed for the Museum and for himself the credit of having demonstrated the serviceability of artificial lighting as a source of illumination for making negatives of high powers. The use of artificial lighting made it possible, as Dr. Woodward reported in 1870, "to sit down quietly of an evening, and during 4 hours of work to produce from 12 to 30 negatives, or more" — a casual reference to the working habits which, along with his zeal and enthusiasm, accounted for his prodigious output. But even before his successful demonstration of the use of artificial light, Dr. Woodward, assisted by Dr. Curtis, made negatives which were clear and well defined at the magnification of 2,344 diameters, and which retained their clarity and definition even when enlarged photographically to 19,050 diameters (fig. 18). 28

Making photomicrographs, however, was but one facet of the work carried on by Lieutenant Colonel Woodward and Major Curtis. There was always the work on the massive medical volumes of the Medical and Surgical History and on the voluminous and growing materials of the Record and Pension Division, which had been committed to Woodward's care.

The most melancholy mission assigned to Doctors Woodward and Curtis was that of doing the autopsy upon the body of President Lincoln, who died at 7:20 a.m., 15 April 1865. The pathologists were summoned to the White House at 11 a.m. to perform the grievous task of finding and removing the bullet fired into Mr. Lincoln's head by the assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Woodward's laconic technical report, addressed to The Surgeon General, gives no hint of the emotional tension under which he must have labored. After describing the bloodshot condition of the eyes and lids, and the condition of the wound and surrounding tissue, swollen with blood, he traces the course of the bullet, which entered through the occipital bone about an inch to the left of