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Modern Medicine Might Have Saved Lincoln
Pcol writes "For the past 13 years the University of Maryland School of Medicine has presented a historical clinicopathological conference where they consider famous historical medical cases such as the death of Alexander the Great and composer Ludwig van Beethoven and provide a modern diagnosis and treatment in each case. This year Dr. Thomas M. Scalea, physician-in-chief for the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center discusses if the world's first center for trauma victims could have improved the outcome had Lincoln's assassination occurred in 2007. 'This could be a recoverable injury, with a reasonable expectation he would survive,' Scalea said, noting that assassin's weapon was relatively impotent compared to the firepower now on the streets today. The modern prognosis predicts that Lincoln might have conceivably recovered enough to return to the White House to complete his second term."
Besides that Mrs. Lincoln... how was the play?
So, what this article is saying is, "Today's technology better than technology 150 years ago..."
And, as pointed out in the article, the weapon used then was relatively impotent. Would it not be safe to consider that if the assassination were committed today the assassin likely would have also used updated technology (i.e., something more, ahem, potent)?
do they have similar presentations at conferences, like how the civil war would have ended if the south had stealth bombers... and how Hannibal would have done if he had a fleet of Hummers with 50cal BMGs?
I'd be more impressed if modern science managed to bring Lincoln back from the dead. ;)
More Twoson than Cupertino
I think the point of the study wasn't that modern medicine could have saved him, it's how it could have. Anyone could come along and say, "oh yeah, modern medicine would have saved him." It takes someone with more experience than the peanut gallery here on Slashdot to explain how.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Lincoln was shot with a .41 derringer, possibly using a rimfire cartridge filled with black power link
.8 inch diameter hole as opposed to the .41 inch hole left by the derringer that did not penetrate
It consisted of a 130 grain lead bullet propelled at 425 ft/second and had a total energy of right around 52 ft. lbs.
Compare that to a modern day 40 S&W cartridge (used by most police today), that sends a 135 grain modern day Jacketed Hollow Point expanding bullet at a velocity of 1200 ft/second producing around 432 ft. lbs. of energy out of a 4 inch barrel (slight loss of velocity for a shorter barrel). This would have gone clean through the head, leaving an approximately
link
He most likely would not have survived if this happened in the modern day.
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
This year Dr. Thomas M. Scalea, physician-in-chief for the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center discusses if the world's first center for trauma victims could have improved the outcome had Lincoln's assassination occurred in 2007
They failed to take into account how frail and weak a Lincoln would be at the age of 198. Surely this would offset most of the benefits of modern medicine.
Honestly, guys, do I have to do all of your thinking for you?
You don't need cryogenic centers. Two guys with a phone booth will do just fine.
"Hello San Dimas!"
"Oh boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?"
Any of us can sit around and speculate about what would happen if Carthage had cannons, if Herodotus had a laptop, if the Romans had camcorders,
I'm particularly interested in what would happen if Caligula had a camcorder.
If only cryogenic resurrection centers had existed at that time we might still have Lincoln with us today.
... and after seeing the current state of the Union, he'd probably shoot himself.
No mod points for the reference? ... BOGUS
Collector's Edition
It figures that a Slashdotter wouldn't recognize a beaver....
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
...they'll announce "We finally have the technology to save Lincoln."
Obligatory Joke:
If Lincoln were alive, what would he be doing today?
Clawing desperately at the lid of his coffin.
They weren't more civil at any point in time, except in some formal settings. We can probably say that when gentlemen met at a posh club, they weren't calling each other cocksuckers, but then again even today they still don't. Move out of that setting, though, and it wasn't some rose-coloured golden age of being nice.
For starters, in that same age, they had just fought a war over, you know, _slavery_. People were bought and sold, treated in some cases worse than cattle, and savagely whipped or occasionally executed on a whim. How's that for being nice to one's fellow humans?
And speaking of that civil war, it saw its share of such colourful characters as Bloody Bill Anderson. The guy was _proud_ of applying terror tactics and executions not only against captured soldiers, but against civillian union sympathisers too.
Newspapers had not yet discovered that it pays to at least pretend to be impartial and objective. Yeah, I know they still aren't really, but back then they didn't even bother pretending. Lopsided, inflamatory and outright insulting journalism was the order of the day. Mud-slinging and outright libel were just normal political tools.
And then you should see what they said about other races and people. If you think nowadays' coverage of Iraq was a shame, back then it was orders of magnitude worse. It was for example the age of "white man's burden" and "mission to civilize" theories, where three quarters of the globe (including such civilizations like China or Japan) were presented as worse than Neanderthals, and it was the _burden_ of us poor white guys from the west to go sneer at them and shaft them, as some civilizing mission. And that was actually the _nice_ version.
It was also the age of such things as train robberies. No, they didn't jump into the train from horseback like in the movies. They just derailed the train, lots of people died, and the survivors got robbed.
It was the age of driving the natives out of their lands, and the occasional massacre. Custer for example wasn't a gentleman soldier in the war against savages, as the media at the time presented him. He was a guy who massacred whole camps, including a good percentage of the women and children, and held the survivors hostage (again, unarmed women and children) to force the rest of the tribe to accept being pushed into a reservation.
Etc, etc, etc.
The past _never_ was as cheerfully rose coloured as naive nostalgia presents it. That goes not only for the 19'th century. The Renaissance wasn't a cheerful age, like ren faires would have you believe, but a shithole that turned the whole european culture morbid and depressive for centuries. The knights in shiny armour weren't ideals of chivalry, but... well, let's just say that one manual for knights advised them to literally beat their wives senseless (as in, literally, until she loses consciousness) to keep them in line, and to break the wife's nose so other men won't find her pretty any more. And that's just one of the many atrocities of that caste. Etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.