Doctor Zebra > Presidential health > Doctors and Presidents > Charles Sabin Taft
	Presidential Physician: Charles Sabin Taft

Presidents

Abraham Lincoln

- Post-mortem: consultant physician - Immediately after assassination shooting: bystander physician

Notes

1. Taft attended the play in Ford's Theater on April 15, 1865. He was the third physician to get to Lincoln after the shooting, being pushed up into the President's box from the main floor of the theater.
 

2. Page 42 of Twenty Days suggests Taft was the second physician to reach Lincoln, but Taft is placed third because his personal account intimates so.
 

3. Taft was the older brother of Bud and Holly Taft, who were close friends and playmates of Lincoln's sons Willie and Tad. There was also a sister, Julia Taft Bayne, who later wrote a book: Tad Lincoln's Father. The father, Horatio Nelson Taft, was chief examiner of the Patent Office. [Gary]
 

4. He was then surgeon in charge at the Signal Corps Camp of Instruction at Red Hill, Georgetown.
 

5. Photograph appears on page 42 of Twenty Days

References

1. Roos CA. Physicians to the Presidents, and their patients: a bibliography. Bull Med Library Assoc. 1961; 49(3): 291-360.
 

2. Gary, Ralph. Following Lincoln's Footsteps. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001; 353-354.
 

3. Kunhardt DM, Kunhardt PB Jr. Twenty Days: A Narrative in Text and Pictures of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Twenty Days and Nights That Followed. New York: Castle Books, 1965.