James A. Garfield
The American Presidents Series: The 20th President, 1881
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The ambitious self-made man who reached the pinnacle of American politics—only to be felled by an assassin's bullet and to die at the hands of his doctors
James A. Garfield was one of the Republican Party's leading lights in the years following the Civil War. Born in a log cabin, he rose to become a college president, Union Army general, and congressman—all by the age of thirty-two. Embodying the strive-and-succeed spirit that captured the imagination of Americans in his time, he was elected president in 1880. It is no surprise that one of his biographers was Horatio Alger.
Garfield's term in office, however, was cut tragically short. Just four months into his presidency, a would-be assassin approached Garfield at the Washington, D.C., railroad station and fired a single shot into his back. Garfield's bad luck was to have his fate placed in the care of arrogant physicians who did not accept the new theory of antisepsis. Probing the wound with unwashed and occasionally manure-laden hands, Garfield's doctors introduced terrible infections and brought about his death two months later.
Ira Rutkow, a surgeon and historian, offers an insightful portrait of Garfield and an unsparing narrative of the medical crisis that defined and destroyed his presidency. For all his youthful ambition, the only mark Garfield would make on the office would be one of wasted promise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of America's least remembered Presidents, Garfield (1831-1881) is convincingly but briefly sketched in this fascinating account of his life and death. Garfield was born in a Cuyahoga County, Ohio log cabin, and his father died when he was two. After a variety if menial jobs in childhood, a rigorous determination to be educated, and a short stint as a Civil War officer, Garfield embarked on a a Congressional career. The intricacies of post- Reconstruction politics dominated his stint there, as well as his presidential campaign, and Rutkow gives an accomplished narrative of the debates of the day. What sets this book apart from other accounts is its its rigorous analysis of the assassination attempt, and the attendant medical mishandlings which led to his death a mere six months after taking office in January of 1881. Rutkow (Bleeding Blue and Grey: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine) is a clinical professor of surgery; he offers a brilliant summary of contemporary medical practices, and chronicles the decline of the President's health with informative (if gory) exactness. The material of the final third of the book is clearly the area of Rutkow's expertise, and the vibrant details and analysis contained there is what makes this an unorthodox but ultimately intriguing example of minor Presidential biography.
