Rest in Pieces

Some of Washingon's Museums Display a Visceral Feel for History

"These are gallstones," say Lenore Barbian. "They're from President Eisenhower."

She's the collections manager at the National Museum of Health and Medicine and she's holding a little jar with a rubber band around it. Inside are jagged pieces of crystallized cholesterol that were removed from the gallbladder of the general who liberated Europe from Hitler, the president who guided America through the '50s.

"This is the actual specimen pathology jar with the original label," she says. She rolls up the rubber band and reads from the paper beneath. " 'Date: 12 December 1966; sex: male; age: 75.' This was donated by his wife. So we actually have her return address label."

Barbian sets the jar back into the drawer.

"But wait," says Steven Solomon, the museum's spokesman, in his best parody of a late-night TV ad huckster, " there's more!"

Barbian picks up a gnarly piece of bone. "This is the vertebrae of John Wilkes Booth," she says. "When he was shot and died, he was autopsied, and they took this as a sample of a gunshot wound to the cervical vertebrae and his story was written up in medical journals."

Booth's backbone has a little glass rod sticking through it at a jaunty angle.

"It shows the trajectory -- the path of the bullet," Barbian explains. "The spinal cord runs right through here, so it clearly bisected the spinal cord. And if you don't believe me, we have the spinal cord, too."

She picks up a yellowing chunk of plastic containing a forlorn gray string of the infamous assassin's spinal cord. On the back of the plastic is the screw that held the specimen to a wall back in the days when it was still exhibited in the museum.

"This used to be displayed next to the Lincoln skull fragments," she says, "and the decision was made that it wasn't appropriate, and Booth was put into storage."

She lays the spinal cord and the vertebrae back into the drawer, a few inches from Ike's gallstones.

"But wait," says Solomon, " there's more!"