This synopsis was written by my father, a physician with an exceptionally dry sense of humor. I've always enjoyed his letters, emails, rants and raves. This article covers the frightening and naive state of medicine in 1881, the time that President Garfield was shot by the assassin, Charles Guiteau. Enjoy!
...A fine example of medical practice at that time is the care given to President James Garfield. On July 2, 1881 he had been in office less than four months when he was shot twice by Charles Guiteau, an embittered attorney who had unsuccessfully sought a consular post. One shot only grazed him, but the other perforated his abdomen and first lumbar vertebra.
The first doctor to arrive administered brandy and spirits of ammonia. The president promptly vomited. Then D. W. Bliss, a leading Washington doctor, appeared and inserted a metal probe into the wound, turning it slowly, searching for the bullet. The probe became stuck between the shattered fragments of Garfield's eleventh rib, and was removed only with a great deal of difficulty. Bliss then inserted his finger into the wound, widening the hole in another unsuccessful probe.
Sixteen leading doctors of the age flocked to Washington to aid in his recovery. It seems each of them wanted to get their hands into him - to probe and grope his wound in an attempt to find the elusive bullet. Infection invariably set in. Internal sores developed, oozing pus and requiring periodic lancing in order to reduce their size.
There were no diagnostic devices then, but Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, tried unsuccessfully to find the bullet with an induction-balance electrical device which he had designed.
As the president's condition weakened, it was decided to move him by train to a cottage on the New Jersey seashore in the hope that the fresh air and quiet there might aid his recovery. Though the president complained of numbness in the legs and feet, which implied the bullet was lodged near the spinal cord, most of the physicians thought it was resting in the abdomen and might have pierced his intestines. His doctors strictly limited his solid food intake.
In mid-August, the doctors insisted that Garfield be fed rectally, and he received beef bouillon, egg yolks, milk, whiskey and drops of opium in this manner. Essentially, his physicians were starving him to death. Between July and September, he lost 80 pounds.
By the time he died on September 19, at age 49, his doctors had turned a small wound into a twenty-inch-long contaminated gash stretching from his ribs to his groin and oozing more pus each day.
Guiteau repeatedly criticized Garfield’s doctors, suggesting that they were the ones who had killed the president. “I just shot him,” he said. This defense was unsuccessful, and he was hanged on June 30, 1882.
