Interesting quotes from pensions

Here are some quotes we found in the pension records. The medical quotes come from surgeon's certificates. Enjoy!

“Chronic inflammation of gastric juice: Absurd” (Robert Livingston, C106 USCT)

“Low specific gravity due to eating freely of watermelons.” (Martin Brown, A137 USCT)

“This report, gentlemen, is by no means satisfactory. . . . Please try it again.”  (Samuel D Eastman, C 23 WI)

“This claimant is on the road to total blindness; will probably soon reach it.”  (Orrin Hay, C23 WI)

“Appetite fair, just ate dinner with me.”  (John L Rowin, A32 WI)

“The applicant is a nice, big, brave, cheery Irishman who has borne a very annoying disabling wound very patiently.”  (Patrick O’Brien, B43 WI)

"He could not hear a loud conversation at an angle slightly behind the right ear out of sight at a distance of 3 feet.  The conversation was such that he would have resented it if he had heard it."  (J. D. Smith, C9 IN)

“Respectfully referred to the medical referee, who will please advise me how “the refractive error of left eye is to be corrected by proper glasses” when the claimant is dead.”  (C9 IN)

“And it is my honest conviction, however speedy your department may be in adjusting his claim that the rider on his pale horse will beat you to his home a long while.” (G. Perry Roudebush, G26 IN)

“Lower extremity of nose is flattened more so than was George Washington’s.” (Edward O’Donnell B35 IN)

“Asylum records state cause of insanity was religious excitement, though our opinion is that the fracture of skull was the predisposing cause.”  (Francis M. Buxton I 156 OH—brothers sample)

(Note from Pension Bureau to Examining Physician) “If you will place your book of instructions before you when writing certificates and observe same you will avoid the return of them for correction.”

From the Special Examiner: "The claimant is a wonderfully ignorant man. The grey matter and the white matter in his brain seem to have run together, if they were ever separated, and have formed an impenetrable mass. It is almost impossible to make him understand anything. His sister Mrs. Lane is perhaps a little brighter, but she is so dense that the degree of difference is hardly appreciable. Her husband, Andrew Jackson Lane, is hardly "three feet to the yard," and is more ignorant than either of the other two. They are all of the lowest sort of people and live more like animals than human beings. Lane and his wife live back in the woods a mile perhaps from any other human habitation and I was not able to get any witness to their mark aside from that of the man whom I took with me. Lane and the claimant make a scant living for themselves and their families by cleaning out cesspools and doing such work as no other one will do."

"I think there is not much doubt but that the claimant was with the regiment as he claims, but he went along something like a horse and wasn't able to tell much more about his service than a horse."

“Had scurvy but is free from it now. Says he eat pork for 8 years and got scurvy then” (Uhline, Joseph G66NY)