The Assassin's Doctor: The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd
The Assassin's Doctor
He set John Wilkes Booth's broken leg. Within weeks, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was on trial for conspiracy in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Shortly before dawn on April 15, 1865, John Wilkes Booth arrived at the Maryland farmhouse of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. Booth had assassinated President Lincoln only hours earlier and had broken his leg during his escape from Ford's Theatre. Mudd treated the injury and allowed Booth to rest before continuing his flight south.
That encounter changed the doctor's life forever.
But the story of Samuel Mudd began long before Booth appeared at his door-and continued long after the assassination trial that made his name part of American history.
The Assassin's Doctor is a full biography of one of the most controversial figures connected with the Lincoln assassination. It follows Mudd from his childhood on a prosperous Maryland tobacco plantation through his medical education, marriage, farming life, slaveholding, encounters with Booth, arrest, military trial, conviction, and sentence to life imprisonment at Fort Jefferson in the remote Dry Tortugas.
There, Mudd endured nearly four years of imprisonment, attempted an escape, and eventually found an unexpected opportunity for redemption when yellow fever swept through the island. With the fort's medical staff devastated by the epidemic, the imprisoned physician helped care for hundreds of desperately ill soldiers-service that contributed to President Andrew Johnson's decision to pardon him in 1869. Contemporary accounts praised Mudd's medical work during the crisis.
The book also examines the difficult questions that have surrounded Mudd for more than 150 years: How well did he really know Booth? What did he know about Booth's earlier plans? Was he a conspirator-or a man condemned largely because he failed to reveal what he knew?
Drawing extensively on trial testimony, official reports, correspondence, contemporary accounts, and other historic documents, The Assassin's Doctor tells the story of Samuel A. Mudd in the broader world in which he lived-from slavery and Civil War Maryland to the Lincoln assassination, Fort Jefferson, pardon, and his eventual return to life as a farmer, family man, and country physician.
This is the story of the man behind one of the most famous names in the Lincoln assassination-and of the complicated life that the familiar story often leaves out.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
