interesting book

Getting back to the post that I wanted to do a couple of days ago...

This past Monday, I was at my local Barnes & Noble just looking for something to read. I wasn't thinking of buying anything, but just to see what was interesting. All of a sudden, one book caught my attention, entitled Destiny of the Republic-A tale of madness, medicine and the murder of a President by Candice Millard. 

Those who know me know that I love history, especially Presidential history, so I decided to buy it...well, maybe she should have picked a different title for the book, but the content, however made the book worth reading. It became a mix of history, politics and medicine; put together in an entertaining and interesting read.

Most people know about the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations because of the extensive writings that have been done about it. But very little has been written about the second Presidential assassination in US history, President James Garfield. This book does a bit to cover that oversight. However the part that intrigued me was the medical mistreatment of the President. And to understand that, you have to go back to the state of medicine in the 1880's. If you saw Ken Burns' The Civil War miniseries, you saw how medical conditions were at that time. Well, very little if anything had changed in two decades.

If the shooting of Garfield had happened a few decades after it did, the President's life would have been saved- there would have been a X-ray to find where the bullet was and in a safe operating room, there would have been surgery and the bullet taken out and the President would have been back on the job in a few days. However none of those advances had taken place in 1881, and the medical abuse of the President started just after the shooting when a physician starting probing the wound with unsterilized fingers. From there it got worse, starting with a doctor who became the dictatorial head of the President's "care team", then continued with American arrogance against a new technique by an English doctor by the name of Joseph Lister (yes, the one they named Listerine after),where the operating room and instruments were sterilized to prevent germs from getting into the patient (the though of American doctors was "if we can't see it, it doesn't exist"), and finally the semi-sabotage of the best chance that the bullet would be found, an device that was basically a  medical "metal detector" invented by Alexander Graham Bell (yes, the inventor of the phone-and if you read about him in this book, Bell was a very driven and dedicated man), that ended up in reality working, but was unsuccessful because of the limitations placed on Bell by the dictatorial doctor. There are so many other things that the President was subjected to in the 80 or so days that he went through this ordeal, but if I put them all down, you wouldn't read the book, would you?

In reality a statement made by the assassin (in today's society, he would have been locked up and put away) during his trial was closer to the truth than people realize..."General Garfield died from malpractice."

If you get a chance, get this book and read it. It may only take a day or two to read, but it is well worth understanding all the events that made up what happened to a President who shouldn't be as obscure as we have made him out to be....