Interesting bit on Isaac Chapman Bates autopsy
http://books.google.com/books?id=YUoWAAAAYAAJ&dq=Jacob+Bates%2BHenry+Bates%2BHAmpshire+County%2C+Massachusetts&ots=-vxj_pHbYx&pg=PA978&lpg=PA978&q=Bates#PRA1-PA1189,M1http://books.google.com/books?id=YUoWAAAAYAAJ&dq=Jacob+Bates%2BHenry+Bates%2BHAmpshire+County%2C+Massachusetts&ots=-vxj_pHbYx&pg=PA978&lpg=PA978&q=Bates#PRA1-PA1189,M1
History of Essex County, Massachusetts
Published by J. W. Lewis & Co., 1888
"....This was Dr. Thomas Sjwall, the resident physician of the place ; whose usefulness here in that capacity was, of course, immediately at an end. The next year he removed to Washington, D. C., where he lived to the age of 59 years, and became very eminent in his profession ; and where, in addition to his practice as physician, he discharged for several years, with distinguished ability, the duties of two professorships to which he had been appointed, in the Medical Department of Columbia College. He was doubtless unsurpassed in this country or abroad, in proficiency in anatomy and surgery, if not also in clinics. His published and widely circulated lectures upon Phrenology, originally delivered before a class at the Medical College in Washington, illustrated by his own examinations and measurements of the brain and skull, and showing the variable widths of the frontal sinuses, had the effect to modify somewhat, so far at least as craniology was concerned, the views of some who had adopted the general conclusions of Gall and Spurzheim, and who still adhered to the theory that the brain is the organ of the mind. Of surgical and anatomical science he was a devotee ; and it is said that the immediate cause of his death was blood-poisoning, which resulted from an accidental inoculation through a cut or abrasion upon one of his hands, while making an autopsy of the body of Hon. Isaac C. Bates, United States Senator from Massachusetts, who died suddenly in Washington, in 1845. ....."