historyNLM Circulating Now1881 · Washington, DC, USA
“The President is somewhat restless…”
On July 2, 1881, President James Garfield was shot at a Washington railway station by Charles Guiteau, a man angry at being denied a diplomatic post. One bullet grazed his arm and the second lodged in his abdomen. Doctors probed the wound with unwashed hands and instruments, because germ theory was not yet accepted in America and abdominal surgery was almost always fatal. Garfield survived the first night, but infection spread slowly over the following weeks and he died in September. Newspapers reprinted the doctors' daily bulletins, and the public wrote in with advice.
Before germ theory, surgeons did not sterilise hands or instruments, so infections from probing wounds were common. Without X-rays, doctors could not see where the bullet was, and probing could introduce more bacteria into the body.
Garfield's case shows the limits of 19th-century medicine just as antiseptic practice was spreading, and it made the public one of the first to follow a national leader's health through official bulletins. Alexander Graham Bell offered to help locate the bullet with a metal detector he had designed.
Garfield's wound is part of a broader story where wartime doctors learned that many deaths came from infection rather than the initial injury, a lesson that led to antiseptic and later antibiotic medicine.
U.S. National Library of Medicine
Illustrative photo · A. Berghaus and C. Upham, published in Frank Leslie's Illus…, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
