It was the morning of July 2, 1881 when James Garfield was passing through the Baltimore and Potomac train station located just outside of Washington, D.C. Garfield was waiting on a train that would take him up to Massachusetts. Garfield's personal agenda was quickly changed in the train station's waiting room where a man named Charles Guiteau approached the president from behind with a 45 caliber English "Bull Dog" revovler. Guiteau shot Garfield from behind twice; one shot grazed his arm whereas the other stuck in his back.
The first doctor on the scene was Dr. Smith Townsend. Townsend saw the 3.5 inch wound in Garfield's back and did what he could to try to remove the bullet. Townsend was not the last doctor to assess the president. The more that doctors prodded and poked the president to remove the wound, the larger it got. It evenually opened up to be 20 inches!
In 1881, sterilization was not a widely known concept. Doctors had not used gloves or clean medical devices to check up on Garfield. A doctor named D.W. Bliss looked for the bullet. So did the surgeon general of the army and the navy. Nobody seemed to be able to find the bullet. Alexan
der Graham Bell, the inventer of the early telephone, hooked up a new metal detecting device to Garfield to find the area of the bullet. After Bell thought that he found the bullet's location, surgeons opened up Garfield even further and couldn't find it. It turns out that Bell's metal detecting device was actually detecting the metal springs under Garfield's bed.Unfortunately, the truth behind the bullet's location was never discovered until the president had passed away. The cause of death is most likely due to an infection after a nick
in the president's liver and blood poisoning due to the lodging of the bullet. The bullet was found post- mortem. It was actually lodged in his vertebrae.After 2 1/2 months of suffering, James Garfield died on September 19, 1881. From this date forward, America's 21st president Chester A. Arthur was sworn in to office. The killer, Charles Guiteau, was charged with capital murder.
His motive was to kill the president for supposedly ruining the grand old Republican Party. There was some evidence to the idea that Guiteau was insane. Guiteau claimed that he was divinely inspired
to kill the president. This evidence did not convince the judge to pardon Guiteau from murder. Guiteau attempted to get a pardon from Chester A. Arthur but that too failed. On June 30, 1882, Guiteau walked up to the scaffold and was hanged. Unfortunately, this was
not the last president assassination our country has experienced.http://www.awesomestories.com/biography/charles_guiteau/charles_guiteau_ch1.htm