Missing Kidney

Specialists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. did not try to conceal their disappointment as they repacked ten small glass slides in a wooden box one day last week. The slides had been hurried over from France by diplomatic courier in the belief that they contained a long-sought medical curio--some tissue sections removed from the kidneys of U.S. Naval Hero John Paul Jones. Undaunted, the pathologists said they had not yet begun to fight, this week resumed the search.

Behind their efforts lay several generations of sleuthing. Until 1905, even the whereabouts of John Paul Jones's corpse was a mystery. After his death in Paris from nephritis in 1792, the body of the Scot who fathered the U.S. Navy was prepared for shipment to the U.S. The limbs were encased in tinfoil; the body was wrapped in a shroud and then was placed in a sealed, straw-and alcohol-filled lead casket. But the U.S. frugally refused to pay the freight. Hero Jones was unceremoniously buried in Paris' obscure St. Louis Cemetery, where he lay undisturbed, despite sporadic efforts over 113 years to find his body.

Not before U.S. Ambassador Horace Porter, a former Army general, spent $35,000 and six years to locate his remains could the U.S. reclaim its hero.

Well preserved by the alcohol,* Jones's body was autopsied by Paris Pathologist Andre Victor Cornil, who snipped bits of tissue from the heart, lungs, spleen and kidneys. The lungs showed evidence of pneumonia and possibly TB, from which Jones was known to have suffered. The kidney tissue showed the effects of nephritis, from which the great captain had died. Pathologist Cornil had the kidney slides photographed; the pictures were sent to the U.S. Congress along with Ambassador Porter's report.

Although Jones's remains were brought home in state (they now rest in the crypt of the Naval Academy Chapel at Annapolis), military medics later began to wonder what had happened to the missing kidney sections. Dr. William Feldman of the Mayo Clinic last September launched the search in Paris, interrogated Cornil's grandson and laboratory aides, finally dug up some old unidentified kidney slides, and had them forwarded to the Institute of Pathology. But when matched against Cornil's 51-year-old photos last week, the slides did not prove to be the ones; the search is still on.

The pathologists would like to get Hero Jones's nephritic kidney slices for a study by paleopathologists, who try to determine the history and pattern of disease. But, as much as anything, they would like John Paul Jones's kidneys for their famed medical museum, there to rest alongside such other patriotic exhibits as a lock of Lincoln's hair, a slide of U.S. Grant's throat cancer, sections of vertebrae (complete with bullet holes) of Assassin John Wilkes Booth and of assassinated President James A. Garfield.

* When he died in 1805 on the deck of his Victory after Trafalgar, Lord Nelson was deposited in a cask of brandy for the long trip home. The legend that sailors tapped the cask and drank off the brandy is apparently apocryphal.

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