Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,108

point. “How terrible it all is,” he wrote to Mabel, who was still at home in Boston. “After seventy-nine days of suffering to be obliged to give up at last. I hope indeed that there may be an immortality for that brave spirit. It is too horrible to think of annihilation and dust.”

Science had not been able to prevent the president’s death, Bell conceded, but neither had religion. “If prayers could avail to save the sick,” he reasoned sadly, “surely the earnest heartfelt cry of a whole nation to God would have availed in this case.”

At four o’clock that afternoon, Garfield’s doctors assembled in the Franklyn Cottage for what Brown would refer to as “the final agony.” The president’s autopsy was performed by Dr. D. S. Lamb of the Army Medical Museum, with the assistance of a local doctor and six of Garfield’s original physicians, including Bliss, Hamilton, and Agnew. Brown was also there, having agreed to represent “the official household,” but was so grief-stricken and horrified by the “ghoulish business” that he found it almost impossible to bear.

In the end, the autopsy would take four, excruciating hours to complete. As afternoon turned to evening, Lamb, working slowly and painstakingly, finally had to ask for more lamps to be brought into the room. Across the street, on the porch of the Elberon Hotel, a growing crowd stood peering at the cottage in the fading light, anxious to know why they had lost their president after months of hope and prayers.

The results of the autopsy would surprise no one more than Garfield’s own doctors. Soon after they had opened his abdomen, with a long, vertical incision and then another, transverse cut, they found the track of the bullet. “The missile,” they realized with sickening astonishment, “had gone to the left.” Following its destructive path—as it shattered the right eleventh and twelfth ribs, moved forward, down, and to the left, through the first lumbar vertebra, and into connective tissue—they finally found Guiteau’s lead bullet. It lay behind Garfield’s pancreas, safely encysted, on the opposite side of the body from where they had been searching.

Running down the right side of Garfield’s body was a long channel, which Bliss and eleven other doctors had probed countless times, convinced that, at the end of it, lay the bullet. The autopsy report stated that, while “this long descending channel was supposed during life to have been the track of the bullet,” it was “now clearly seen to have been caused by the burrowing of pus from the wound.” Pus, however, does not burrow. It simply follows an open path, which, in this case, was made by the doctors’ own fingers and instruments. Alongside the channel lay Garfield’s liver, slightly enlarged but untouched. There was, the report noted, “no evidence that it had been penetrated by the bullet.”

What was perhaps as stunning to the doctors as the location of the bullet was the infection that had ravaged Garfield’s body. Evidence of the proximate cause of his death, profound septic poisoning, was nearly everywhere they looked. There were collections of abscesses below his right ear, in the middle of his back, across his shoulders, and near his left kidney. He had infection-induced pneumonia in both of his lungs, and there was an enormous abscess, measuring half a foot in diameter, near his liver. “The initial point of this septic condition probably dates as far back as the period of the first chill,” one of Garfield’s doctors would later admit. “The course of this … infection was practically continuous, and could only result in inevitable death.”

The immediate cause of Garfield’s death was more difficult to determine. After removing most of his organs, they finally found it—a rent, nearly four-tenths of an inch long, in the splenic artery. The hemorrhage had flooded Garfield’s abdominal cavity with a pint of blood, which by now had coagulated into an “irregular form … nearly as large as a man’s fist.” This, they realized, had been the cause of the terrible pain that had forced him to cry out to Swaim just before his death.

After the examination was finally complete, Agnew silently approached the president’s body. As everyone in the room watched, he reached out with one hand and ran his little finger down Garfield’s spinal column. The finger “slipped entirely through the one vertebra pierced by the bullet,” Brown would later recall. Dropping his hand, Agnew turned to the men standing around him and said, “Gentlemen, this was the fatal wound. We made