DO YOU REMEMBER HOW OUR 20TH PRESIDENT DIED?

DO YOU REMEMBER HOW OUR 20^TH PRESIDENT DIED?

            Do you remember who our 20^th President was? James A. Garfield, (I think about that stupid cartoon cat every time) was the 20^th President of the United States. I did not know this due to it has been a long time since history class. I hated history in school. I however found the death of this President very interesting.

            If your memory tells you he died from an assassin's bullet, you are incorrect. He actually met his untimely demise through the hands of a great team of doctors. Great being the debatable term here.

            Apparently, many Americans do not recognize his name because he did not do squat that was memorable. This could be because he was only in office for 200 days when he was shot.

            Charles Guiteau became irate when passed over for U.S. ambassadorship to France. It is commonly believed that this pissed-off lawyer was responsible for the assassination of Garfield. WRONG! It did however set things in motion. Guiteau was a real zealous religious nut that claimed God ordered him to kill Garfield.

            Before shooting Garfield, Guiteau stalked him and went as far as to visit the Washington jail where he would be incarcerated. He had to make sure it met up to his living standards. You have to wonder if it had not would he have went through with the assassination attempt?

            On July 2, 1881, the zealous religious nut who talked to God shot Garfield twice. One bullet grazed his arm and the other lodged somewhere inside the President's body.

           Over the next eight days, sixteen doctors would help to put Garfield, along with Alexander Graham Bell, in the grave.

            During this time of practicing medicine sterilization had been preached, but not widely practiced. Willard Bliss was the first idiot doctor to examine Garfield by taking his non sterile finger and sticking it into the wound and followed up by sticking a non sterile probing instrument in to find the bullet. Of course, said idiot did not find the bullet but he did manage to dig out a false passage that helped to confuse the other physicians as to the actual path of the bullet.

            Since they were not able to find the bullet, they assumed it had penetrated the liver, that surgery would be of no use, and that the President would surely die quickly. What they did not expect was to be wrong.

            When Garfield did not die, you will never guess what happened next. An army surgeon general stuck his unwashed finger, probably right after going to take a dump, into the wound and dug as deep as he could. Next up came a navy surgeon general who probably just came off the infectious disease ward, had picked his nose, and coughed in his hands, spitting up that last bit of bronchitis, and without washing them, stuck his finger in deep and rooted around so hard that he actually did puncture the liver. This time they concluded that the President was for sure a goner.

            Garfield, though, was one tough old bird. The doctors were wrong again.

            Garfield began running a fever so they put him on a diet of milk and spiked it with brandy. That actually does not sound half-bad. Must be the alcoholic in me.

            Now that they have him drunk all the time and not feeling much pain they all continue to stick their grubby, huge-ass, filthy fingers down the wound and root around for the bullet with no luck in finding it.

            Finally they call for reinforcements. The call the phone guy, Alexander Graham Bell. He rigged up a medical detector that was so crude that it probably looked like a medieval torture device to help find the bullet. It took several passes before Bell located the bullet. It was much deeper than originally believed.

            With this news, the doctors were ready to slice and dice on the President. His condition was steadily growing worse and they still found no bullet.

            With further investigation, after putting Garfield through the added stress of surgery, they found out that Bell had actually found the metal spring under the mattress instead of a bullet.

            What started out as a three inch wound had turned into a twenty inch canal from all the poking and digging. Now it was severely infected and oozing pus more and more as the days passed. YUCK! Could you imagine being the nurse to change that dressing?

            I'm telling you Garfield didn't give up easy. Now we have a drunken President, with a massive infection, and possible blood poisoning from the bullet causing strain on the President's heart and causing it to weaken.

            A few days later Garfield had a massive heart attack and the same physicians screwed him over with another wrong diagnosis.

            These same doctors diagnose him with a rupturing blood vessel in his stomach. Only minutes later, on September 19, 1881, President Garfield died.

            The autopsy revealed that the bullet had lodged itself four inches from the spine in a protective cyst. Garfield would have survived if the doctors had left him alone.

            With all this evidence out, nutcase lawyer Guiteau claimed that he did not kill the President and that the doctors deserved all the blame. In this day and time, that argument would hold up in court. However, on June 30, 1882, it did not and Guiteau was sentenced to death by hanging.

            The doctors had the audacity to submit a bill for services totaling $85,000 to the Senate. The government gave them $10,000 and Dr. Bliss was forced to make a public apology. I wonder what his practice was like after that.

            Reference: Useless Information: Stuff You Never Never Need To Know But Your Life Would Be Incomplete Without