Dr. Charles Leale

(AP) The first doctor to reach President Abraham Lincoln after he was
shot in a Washington theater rushed to his ceremonial box and found
him paralyzed, comatose and leaning against his wife. Dr. Charles
Leale ordered brandy and water to be brought immediately. The
Army surgeon had been seated 40 feet from Lincoln at Ford’s
Theater that night in April 1865. 

Dr. Leale, who was 23 and just six weeks into his medical practice when
Lincoln died, never spoke or wrote about his experiences again until
1909 in a speech commemorating the centennial of the president’s
birth. 

Leale’s long-lost report of efforts to help the mortally wounded president, 
written just hours after his death, was discovered late last month by
researchers in a box among correspondence of the U.S. surgeon
general at the National Archives.

Drawing of Lincoln’s Death Bed