Notes [excerpt]

     If another president or most eminent personage become the victim of the assassin’s method, or if such an one be seriously wounded in any other way, we suggest that he or she be spiritd [sic] away out into some isolatd [sic] section where a good old country doctor unmolestd [sic] and unhamperd [sic] may treat the case according to his own good notions with just such means as are at hand, thereby allowing such illustrious one the largest chance of recovery. The continuous fuss and feather about counting the blood, taking temperature, noting heart beats and enumerating respirations and all these gone over several times a day, to the annoyance and hurt of the mortally wounded president, is what calls forth this item.
     Again, it may be said that a board of eminent surgeons who gave out right along and even to the seventh day after the wounding of our late and most illustrious president, an average pulse beat of 120; respiratien [sic] 26; temperature above a hundred degrees, and invariably supplementing the pathological report with the assurance that the patient was getting well; we say that a board of surgeons, eminent or no eminency that would do so, deserves the keenest kind of general and special criticism. And that they meant to deceive the people; or else that they themselves were ignorantly unaware, was evidenct [sic] by the matter of allowing the vice-president to absent himself in a way and to such extent that great inconvenience resultd [sic] to him and anxiety to the nation.
     Let the people be informd [sic] that in any like case: given a daily temperature of exceeding a hundred degrees, Fahrenheit, a circulation of 120 to 126 and a respiration of 26 to [490][491] 28 means death ninety-nine cases in every hundred. This is written before any revelations which an autopsy may reveal have been given out, but we venture that pus will have been found at seat of retained ball, or that a peritonitis existed between the stomach and the parietes wound and further, that the stomach puncturings will have been found closed.