Dr. Charles Augustus Leale (1842–1932) was a surgeon in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He was the first doctor to arrive at the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865 after John Wilkes Booth fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head with a Philadelphia Deringer pistol. At the time, Leale was a twenty-three-year-old surgeon who had just six weeks earlier graduated in medicine from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York. Leale’s account of Lincoln’s death was not publicly revealed until the one hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth in 1909. Leale was one of the last surviving attendees of Lincoln’s assassination upon his death in 1932. |
