Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [150]
4 “Everybody ran hither and thither”: McCabe, Our Martyred President, 535.
5 Determined to find out for himself: Tainter, “The Talking Machine,” 17.
6 “no one could venture to predict”: Bell, Upon the Electrical Experiments, 1.
7 “Nature did all she could”: Girdner, “The Death of President Garfield,” Munsey’s Magazine, 548.
8 “none the worse for it”: “What Surgeon J. F. May Says,” New York Times, July 8, 1881.
9 “had been a ‘tough’ ”: Girdner, “The Death of President Garfield,” 547.
10 “the crowds were rapidly increasing”: “A Great Nation in Grief,” New York Times, July 3, 1881.
11 Inside the White House: Seale, The President’s House, 522.
12 “President Garfield was shot and killed”: Clark, The Murder of James A. Garfield, 64.
13 At the top of his list of potential competitors: “The President’s Physicians,” New York Times, July 13, 1881.
14 When Baxter arrived at the White House: Bliss, Statement of the Services Rendered by the Surgeons in the Case of the Late President Garfield, 19.
15 “Why, doctor”: Ibid., 19.
16 “He is my patient”: Bliss’s wife to her brother, August 28, 1881.
17 “I know your game”: “The President’s Physicians,” New York Times, July 13, 1881.
18 “Dear Doctor”: D. W. Bliss to doctors, July 3, 1881.
19 “He just took charge of it”: “President Garfield’s Case,” American Observer, 494.
20 “select such counsel”: Reyburn, Clinical History of the Case of President James Abram Garfield, 15.
21 To his mortification, however: Clark, The Murder of James A. Garfield, 99.
22 Lucretia, in fact, had taken matters: Dr. Edson was a homeopathic physician. Like other homeopaths, her philosophy was in direct opposition to that of allopathy, the type of medicine that Bliss, Baxter, and the vast majority of American doctors then practiced. In medical school, she had been taught that “like cures like.” When treating a patient, she tried to prescribe medicines that produced the same symptoms in her patients as the diseases from which they were suffering. More important, she believed in the “law of infinitesimals”—the smaller the dose, the more effective the treatment. Although homeopathic medicine did little good, neither did it cause much harm, certainly in comparison to allopathy. In the late nineteenth century, American allopathic doctors still relied heavily on “heroic measures”—not as a last resort, but as a first step. They vigorously argued the benefits of bleeding, blistering, and scarification. Purging was also considered highly therapeutic, brought on by doses so toxic that they caused violent vomiting and, occasionally, death.
23 The stout, bespectacled doctor: Feis, Mollie Garfield in the White House, p. 70.
24 “Mrs. Dr. Edson”: Balston, Life of President Garfield, Supplementary Chapter by Edson, 612.
25 Dr. Silas Boynton: Garfield had an especially high regard for Boynton because the doctor had “burst the narrow barriers of homeopathy.”
26 “Please to have you come”: Deppisch, “Homeopathic Medicine and Presidential Health,” 6.
27 “I had a taste of what has been”: Pasteur and Lister, Germ Theory and Its Applications to Medicine, 144.
28 “all evil consequences”: Bankston, 35.
29 “In order to successfully practice”: Clark, The Murder of James A. Garfield, 72.
30 “Judging the future by the past”: Ibid.
31 “good old surgical stink”: Ibid., 70; Guthrie, From Witchcraft to Antisepsis, 32.
32 Some physicians felt that Lister’s: Rutkow, James A. Garfield, 110.
33 They preferred, moreover: Haller, American Medicine in Transition, 1840–1910, ix.
34 Even those doctors willing to try: Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century, 256; Clark, The Murder of James A. Garfield, 73.
35 “had the physician in charge abstained”: Gerster, Recollections of a New York Surgeon, 206.
36 “Do not allow probing”: Dr. E. L. Patee to Lucretia Garfield, July 3, 1881, James A. Garfield Papers, Library of Congress. Patee understood gunshot wounds as well as any of the doctors circling the White House, and better than most. Just a few years after graduating from Ohio’s Western Reserve Eclectic