How doctors killed president garfield

Garfield Presidency Page. Garfield Essays Life in Brief. Life Before the Presidency. Campaigns and Elections. Domestic Affairs. Foreign Affairs. Death of the President Current Essay. Family Life. The American Franchise. Impact and Legacy. During his last 80 days of life, Garfield wasted away from a plump pounds to a bony pounds. Without the aid of a stethoscope, Dr. Doctor W. Guiteau was later found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, even though he was one of first high-profile cases in American history to plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

He was hanged on June 20, , in Washington D. To be sure, in , when Garfield was shot, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch were at work scientifically demonstrating the germ theory of disease to great public acclaim. This technique required surgeons and nurses to thoroughly wash their hands and instruments in anti-septic chemicals, such as carbolic acid or phenol, before touching the patient.

In real time, however, many mainstream physicians and surgeons did not fully adopt anti-septic techniques until into the mid-to-late s, and for some, as late as the early s.

Blaming his doctors may be a tantalizing literary trope but President Garfield had an excellent chance of dying from the ordeal no matter who treated him during his awful, last summer. The annals of medical history are littered with such retrospective diagnoses that can never really be proven but, nevertheless, make for great medical tales.

Nevertheless, Bliss and his colleagues certainly cannot be credited with helping Mr. Garfield all that much. In the final, post-mortem analysis, the president desperately needed a modern medical miracle long before his doctors were equipped to produce one. He might have survived had his injuries not been contaminated, either by the gunshots themselves or the interventions that followed. Willard Bliss, a former Civil War surgeon, and his handpicked consultants underwent daily scrutiny by the professional community and lay press.

And according to Dr. Jeffrey Reznick of the National Library of Medicine, they rejected the use of antiseptics pioneered by British surgeon Joseph Lister, for whom Listerine would later be named. They didn't believe in germs - germs you couldn't see. On the scene at the train station: Cabinet member Robert Todd Lincoln. Present at his father's death 16 years before, he would also witness the murder of McKinley 20 years later.

It was Lincoln who summoned Dr. Willard Bliss the 'D' stood for Doctor, his actual first name. There would be no second opinions. For an excruciating 80 days, made even worse by the oppressively hot Washington summer, Garfield suffered stoically as his condition worsened.

And he was starving to death. Unable to keep down the rich sumptuous meals he was being fed, the president's weight plunged from pounds to Bell's task: Use his "induction balance," a kind of metal detector, to find the bullet so it could be extracted once and for all.