A closer look
President James A. Garfield easily survived being shot in the back by a delusional assassin in 1881, but he was subsequently murdered by his own extremely arrogant doctors who spent the next two months aggressively digging their unwashed fingers into his open wound. American physicians at the time actively rejected the modern European concept of sterile environments, believing germ theory was just a bunch of ridiculous nonsense, so they continually poked around in his abdomen searching for the bullet with dirty hands. They even brought in Alexander Graham Bell to use a primitive metal detector to find the lead slug, but the device failed miserably because Garfield was lying on a new mattress containing metal springs that confused the machine. The president eventually died from massive, systemic infections caused entirely by his elite medical team, proving that sometimes the absolute worst thing you can do after surviving a gunshot is let an American doctor anywhere near you
