248 pages
11 illustrations, index
September 2016
978-1-61234-865-0
$27.95 Add to CartSeptember 2016
978-1-61234-863-6
$27.95 Add to CartShortly after being elected president of the United States, James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau. But contrary to what is written in most history books, Garfield didn’t linger and die. He survived. Alexander Graham Bell raced against time to invent the world’s first metal detector to locate the bullet in Garfield’s body so that doctors could safely operate. Despite Bell’s efforts to save Garfield, however, and as never before fully revealed, the interventions of Garfield’s friend and doctor, Dr. D. W. Bliss, brought about the demise of the nation’s twentieth president.
But why would a medical doctor engage in such monstrous behavior? Did politics, petty jealousy, or failed aspirations spark the fire inside Bliss that led him down the path of homicide? Rosen proves how depraved indifference to human life—second-degree murder—rather than ineptitude led to Garfield’s drawn-out and painful death. Now, more than one hundred years later, historian and homicide investigator Fred Rosen reveals through newly accessed documents and Bell’s own correspondence the long list of Bliss’s criminal acts and malevolent motives that led to his murder of the president.
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Hank Garfield
Preface
Prologue: The Rainbow City
Part One
1. “Circumstances Have Led Me into Both Callings”
2. “First Fruit”
3. “I Am Greatly Perplexed on the Question of Duty”
4. “The Men of the Third Infantry Were Not Receiving the Best of Medical Care”
5. “To Lose Kentucky Is Nearly the Same as to Lose the Whole Game”
6. “I Probably Should Not Have Kept Attacking”
7. “Why Don’t You Plant Flower Seeds?”
8. “It Will Indeed Be a Day of Blood”
9. “The Republican Majority in Congress Is Very Small”
10. “Hands Up!”
Part Two
11. “God Reigns, and the Government at Washington Still Lives!”
12. “You Don’t Really Feel You Are Going into the Backwoods, Do You?”
13. “The Doctor Declares that the Minister Does Not Own an Acre of Land There”
14. “Be Always Sure You Are Right, Then Go Ahead”
15. “We Should Not Speak of Love"
16. “Aye, There’s the Rub”
17. “Mr. President, Are You Badly Hurt?”
18. “It Was a Time of Intense Excitement and Painful Suspense”
19. “Science Should Be Able to Discover Some Less Barbarous Method of Exploration”
Part Three
20. “Papa Has Gone to Make Poor Mr. Garfield Well”
21. “She Excites in Me the Fire of Lawless Passion”
22. “Feeding per Rectum”
23. “We Were Enabled . . . to Use Specially Prepared Blood”
24. “Mr. President . . . You Are Getting Out of the Woods”
25. “The Bullet Was Not in Any Part of the Area Explored!”
26. “I Think the Doctors Did the Work”
27. “I Am Not Guilty of the Charge Set Forth in the Indictment”
Epilogue: Over the Rainbow City
Acknowledgments
Appendix: The Garfield Agreement of 1872
Notes
Bibliography
Index
