A Wound That Medicine Made Worse
On July 2, 1881, an assassin shot President James A. Garfield twice. One bullet grazed his arm; the other entered his back and lodged somewhere inside his body. Garfield did not die at the scene, and the bullet itself was not immediately fatal. But surviving the shooting was only the beginning of a long medical ordeal.
Doctors repeatedly probed the wound with unsterilized fingers and instruments, trying to trace the bullet by touch. At the time, many American physicians had not accepted the idea that invisible germs caused infections. Joseph Lister’s antiseptic methods—using chemicals to reduce contamination during surgery—were known, but not widely adopted in the United States. The doctors’ efforts may have carried bacteria deeper into Garfield’s body and helped create extensive infection.
The Detector Meets a Metal Bed
Inventor Alexander Graham Bell tried to help locate the bullet with an electromagnetic device called an induction balance. It could detect metal by registering changes in an electrical field. But the test was frustrating: the device gave confusing results, and the bed’s metal springs interfered with the readings. Bell and his assistants could not reliably establish where the bullet was. The detector was an early, imperfect technology, not a modern scanner—and the examination conditions made its task harder.
Garfield remained ill for nearly 80 days. Infection spread through damaged tissue, while fever, pain, and inadequate nourishment further weakened him. He died on September 19, 1881. The bullet was eventually found in his body during the autopsy, on the side opposite where some doctors had searched.
A Tragedy of Treatment
Calling Garfield’s death a deliberate killing by his physicians goes beyond what the evidence supports: they were trying to save him, using the medical practices and assumptions of their era. Still, their repeated probing illustrates a devastating consequence of medicine before germ theory took hold. A wound that might have been survivable became far more dangerous when treatment introduced infection rather than controlling it.
