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When Doctors Killed a President: Garfield's Lethal Medical Error
When Doctors Killed a President: Garfield's Lethal Medical Error
The idea that a sitting U.S. president survived an assassin’s bullets but then died because of medical care is both shocking and grimly specific: James A. Garfield was shot at 9:30 AM on July 2, 1881, and the medical establishment that treated him ignored practices already in use in European operating rooms. What exactly did his doctors do - or fail to do - that turned a survivable wound into a fatal case?
In this episode, we tell who James Garfield was before the shooting, how Charles Guiteau planned and carried out the…
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