EXECUTIVE MANSION, _August 14, 1888_.
_To the Senate_:.
I return without approval Senate bill No. 1762, entitled "An act
granting a pension to Benjamin A. Burtram."
The beneficiary named in this bill was mustered into the military
service November 26, 1861; he was reported present until February 28,
1862, and was discharged for disability July 26, 1862.
The medical certificate of the disability of this soldier was made by
the senior surgeon of a hospital in Louisville, Ky., and stated that the
soldier had been disabled for sixty days; that his lungs were affected
with tubercular deposits in both, and that there was some irregularity
in the action of the heart; that he was of consumptive family, his
mother, brother, and two sisters having died of that disease according
to his and his father's account.
It is of course supposed that this certificate was based upon an
examination of the patient, though both he and his father seem to have
supplemented such an examination with statements establishing a
condition and history which operated to bring about a discharge.
I do not find, however, either as the result of examinations or
statements, any other trouble or disability alleged than those mentioned
above.
But in 1879, seventeen years after the soldier's discharge, and
during the period when arrearages of pensions were allowed on such
applications, he filed a claim for pension, in which he alleged that
about December 1, 1861, while unloading gun boxes, he incurred a
rupture, and that in January, 1862, he was taken with violent pains in
left arm and side, causing permanent disability.
It will be observed that the time of the incurrence of these
disabilities is fixed as quite early in the very short military service
of this soldier; and it certainly seems that, though short, his term of
service was sufficiently long to develop such disabilities as he claims
to have incurred to such an extent that they neither would have escaped
in the succeeding July the examination of the surgeon nor the mention of
the soldier.
A medical examination which followed the application for pension in 1879
disclosed a large scrotal hernia, but no discoverable trouble of left
arm and side.
A special examination of the case was made and a large amount of
testimony taken. Without giving it in any detail as it is reported
to me, I fail to find in it reasonably satisfactory proof that the
disabilities upon which he now bases his claim for a pension were
incurred in the military service.