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Inside This Issue
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Meet Dr. Scott’s New Puppy!
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The Ultimate Beach Retreats to Visit This Year
Simple Tricks for Cooling Off Your Beauty Routine
Spotting Eyelid Cancer — Don’t Wait to Act
Lime Chicken With Corn and Poblano Salad
Aspiring Necromancer Sought to Revive George Washington
Washington had been both a friend and benefactor to Thornton. A classic product of the Enlightenment, Thornton was a brilliant polymath considered a genius in his time. He was born in the British West Indies and attended medical school in Scotland before gaining American citizenship. Washington selected Thornton’s design for the U.S. Capitol. Upon arriving at Mount Vernon, Thornton was shocked to see the president’s corpse, frozen solid from the frigid winter temperatures and surrounded by grieving family and friends. The situation did not stop the doctor from hatching a bold plan to revive him. Thornton had studied numerous cases of people who were revived after appearing to be dead. He was an early advocate of the medical technique of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to revive victims of near-drownings. Before Washington died, he had suffered a series of tortuous medical treatments for a bad throat infection, including numerous bloodlettings, throat poultices, enemas, and purgatives. Thornton recalled cases he had read about fish being revived after freezing and proposed to thaw Washington’s corpse in cold water, restore air to his body by performing a tracheotomy, and replace the blood drained by the doctors with lamb’s blood. If a lack of air and loss of blood had killed the president, then restoring them and warming the body should revive him, Thornton reasoned. None of Washington’s grieving family and friends supported Thornton’s idea. They recalled the former president’s deathbed instructions to the doctors attending him at the time, “I pray you to take no more trouble about me; let me go off quietly.” Ultimately, the president’s instructions were honored. Despite Thornton’s effort to have his body transported to the Capitol for burial, they granted Washington’s final wish: He was permanently interred at his Mount Vernon home.
HOW A DOCTOR PLANNED TO RESURRECT GEORGE WASHINGTON MANIC MEDIC
Fans of deathbed dramas can hardly ask for a more harrowing tale than the story of an overconfident doctor who tried to resurrect George Washington.
As the former president lay dying in December of 1799, Dr. William Thornton raced to Washington’s Mount Vernon home in hopes of reaching him before he passed away, according to “Washington’s End,” a 2020 book by historian and White House speechwriter Jonathan Horn.
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