Good morning, it's Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023. On this date 142 years ago, President James A. Garfield finally succumbed to his wounds after being shot two-and-a-half months earlier at a Washington railway station.
It's fairly clear today that what killed the 20th U.S. president was the unenlightened medical treatment he received, not the bullet lodged in his body. From the moment he was shot until the night he died, Garfield's attending physicians ignored state-of-the-art thinking in the health profession, i.e., that sterilization could prevent infections.
If left untreated, Garfield most likely would have recovered on his own. Besides introducing countless bacteria to their patient and operating on him repeatedly without anesthesia, his attending doctors basically starved him to death: Garfield lost 100 pounds before he died.
Yet his well-meaning, if clueless, doctors grieved mightily along with the nation when James Garfield succumbed.
James Garfield's death was a tragedy for a nation still healing itself after the Civil War. He was the second Republican president murdered in 16 years. Thankfully, his assassin wasn't a politically motivated Confederate, as was the case in Abraham Lincoln's murder, but instead a delusional former mental patient. Southerners mourned for Garfield, as did Northerners.
No one, however, grieved as much as those in Garfield's inner circle. The doctors, despite their ineptitude, were desperate enough to let Alexander Graham Bell probe Garfield's body with a new invention that could detect metal. And when he finally died they were stricken, along with his family and top aides, one of whom was Abraham Lincoln's oldest son.
The first lady, Lucretia Garfield, sat in a chair shaking convulsively, tears pouring down her cheeks, but uttering no sound. His daughter Mollie, the New York Times reported the next day, threw herself upon her father's shoulder on the opposite side of the bed "and sobbed as if her heart would break."
A dispatch was sent to W. H. Crump, the custodian of the White House, announcing the news. The cabinet was notified, then the newspapers, and then a sad nation. According to the memoirs of Dr. D. W. Bliss, Mrs. Garfield leaned over her husband and exclaimed, "Oh! Why am I made to suffer this cruel wrong?"
An entire country, still reeling over the carnage of the Civil War, felt her pain.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
