James A. Garfield: The American Presidents Series: The 20th President 1881

The ambitious self-made man who reached the pinnacle of American politics―only to be felled by an assassins bullet and to die at the hands of his doctors. James A. Garfield was one of the Republican Partys 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.. Garfields 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. Garfields 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 Garfields 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.