September 22, 2011
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 9/22/2011
War-date Union soldier Autograph Letter Signed on behalf of "Patients" of the Lincoln General Hospital, 3pp. octavo, October 6, 1864, addressed to Dr. Zachariah Philip Dennler, and reads with good content: "..."We your former patients hope you will use your influence towards getting Patrick Cooper to his Company. He is disgracing us here by getting drunk and exposing himself. We fear that through his meanness we who are sick will lose the good will of the doctor of his ward. [Thomas R Sewell] The other day he got drunk and commenced to tell what a mean man you were. He says your word is not to be relied on. He told John Sheridan that you never would get his discharge because your word was not trustworthy. And he says he dont believe that you ever meant to give the rest of us passes. When he was drunk he began to tell how they used to water the tea in the cook house and how you and Dr. Russell lived on hospital rations and that there was three hundred dollars saved in the cook house one month. We hope you will write to the doctor and have him sent to his company for we are ashamed of him. He is mad with you because you did not give him a furlough or a discharge. John Sheridan can tell you how he talked about you and how you tried to get a majors position and failed in the attempt...The doctor in charge of this ward is Thos. R. Sewall..." Fine condition. Zachariah Philip Dennler (1838-1890) served with the 10th New York Heavy Artillery and the 7th United States Colored Troops as an assistant surgeon during the Civil War. His probe is housed at the National Museum of Health and Medicine at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as it was the probe used to remove the bullet from Abraham Lincoln's brain hours after it was discharged from the gun of John Wilkes Booth.
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