Assassination of James Garfield: The Bullet Didn’t Kill Him | Pt. 1

Founding Felons is back! A bullet put President James Garfield on the floor of a train station in 1881 — but it wasn't the bullet that killed him.

In Part 1 of Founding Felons Week, Tyrella and Nikita trace the unlikely life of James A. Garfield: the dirt-poor Ohio farm boy who couldn't swim but dreamed of being a sailor, and the self-taught general who went on to win the closest popular-vote election in U.S. history. Four months into his presidency, he was shot at a Washington train station — and then handed over to his doctors.

We get into the shooting, Dr. Charles Burleigh Purvis (the first Black physician to treat a sitting president, and the one man in the room who was right), and the nearly 80-day medical disaster that followed — the finger-probed wound, the misfired Alexander Graham Bell metal detector, and the sepsis that did what the gun couldn't.

Part 2 drops Thursday: the assassin, Charles Guiteau, and a trial that went completely off the rails. Patrons can listen now.

Content warning: graphic 19th-century medical detail and descriptions of an infected gunshot wound.