Lamb's Will

His brain to be crocked in glass at Cornell University,* his skeleton to be mounted and displayed at Washington, his vital organs to be disposed here and there --such was the will of Dr. Daniel Smith Lamb, 85, Army autoptician, who died at Washington last week of pneumonia. During his long medical career he had performed 1,500 post mortems including those of President James Abram Garfield and his assassin Charles Jules Guiteau; and Grant's second Vice President, Henry Wilson,/- "I, Daniel Smith Lamb," he wrote in his will, "object to burial or incineration and had rather after my death, and if practicable, before any embalming is done, that an autopsy be made upon my body by some competent person." The competent person whom he preferred is Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, who is a doctor of medicine as well as chief anthropologist for the Smithsonian Institution. "Dr. Lamb was too dear to me," said Dr. Hrdlicka when the job was put up to him last week. So Major George Russell Callender, curator of the Army Medical Museum, did it.

Dr. Lamb was a thorough man. Knowing that life leaves its stigmata on the body, he carefully detailed his health history in his will. He reported that, as a child, he had varioloid measles, sore throat and "colds." When he was twelve he had struck his head upon a stone and gone unconscious for a short time. Then he walked home. Apparently there were no after results. But for years his scalp had felt tender. In adult life he had had typhoid, acute rheumatism, labyrinthine deafness, pneumonia five times, influenza, chronic laryngitis, chronic ulcer of nasal septum.

All this he told. Then he gave his body measurements and concluded, for whatever use it might be to Medicine: "I have been fond of music and literary work. Poor in mathematics. Not much given to sports. Have not used tobacco, alcoholic liquors or narcotics."

* Cornell's Wilder collection includes the brain of Burt Green Wilder, of Helen Hamilton Gardener (TIME, Sept. 14, 1925).

/-Mr. Wilson's name was Jeremiah Jones Colbaith originally. Grant's original given names were Hiram Ulysses, not Ulysses Simpson.