James Abram Garfield has been remembered not for his life, but for his death. After America’s 20 th president was shot by assassin Charles Guiteau in 1881, only four months after coming into office, he suffered for a summer with a bullet lodged in his back, attended by a doctor who did not yet buy into the theories of Joseph Lister, and who kept sticking unsterilized fingers and instruments into Garfield’s wound. When Alexander Graham Bell came to the president’s bedside to try to locate the bullet, using a new invention designed to detect metal, the doctor was so far off in his estimation of where the bullet might be that he had Bell scan the wrong place. The bullet was not found, and the president died of infection, having lost almost 100 pounds while in his sickbed.

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