A Cunning Plan

George Washington died of a throat infection 221 years ago this week.

But he almost didn't.

Aware he was dying—and afraid of being buried alive—Washington begged his personal secretary to assure him his body would not be interred until three days after his death. 

Accordingly, Washington lay on view in the "saloon" of Mount Vernon for the three days after his last breath.

But a certain Dr. William Thornton wasn't having it.

He had a cunning plan.

A European-trained physician, Thornton had been summoned to Washington's bedside three days before, in order to save the dying president through tracheotomy. Arriving late, Thornton found Washington not in bed, but "laid out a stiffened corpse" in a wooden casket in the saloon.

So the good doctor pivoted, as he described years later in a scientific paper:

"The weather was very cold, and Washington remained in a frozen state for several days," Thornton wrote. "I proposed to attempt his restoration, in the following manner: first to thaw him in cold water, then to lay him in blankets, and by degrees and by friction to give him warmth, and to put into activity the minute blood vessels, at the same time to open a passage to the lungs by the trachea, and to inflate them with air, to produce an artificial respiration, and to transfuse blood into him from a lamb."

Washington's relatives rejected Thornton's ghoulish plan, asking would it be right "to recall to life one who had departed full of honor and renown; free from the frailties of age; in the full enjoyment of every faculty; and prepared for eternity?”

Scorned, Thornton asked the family to consider replacing Washington's wooden casket with a lead one, so the dead president might some day be removed from Mount Vernon to the new US Capitol.

The family gave the late president his lead coffin; but the body still lays in the family vault, just a stone's throw from the saloon.

Above: George Washington's life mask.