Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,71
firmly. “Please do not speak again of death.”
• CHAPTER 14 •
ALL EVIL CONSEQUENCES
Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly,
as the gods whose feet were shod with wool.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
While most of the country heard newsboys crying “Extra!” in the streets or overheard the frantic whispers of friends, news of the president’s shooting reached the Volta Laboratory by telephone call. Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant, Charles Sumner Tainter, was in the laboratory in Washington, working on a row of wax impressions for the phonograph, when his telephone suddenly sprang to life, its sharp ring shattering the silence and wrenching him away from his work. Although by now the invention had been installed in thousands of homes, for most Americans, it was not yet part of the everyday world. Even Bell did not often hear it ring.
If Tainter was surprised to receive a telephone call, he was astonished by the news it brought. “President Garfield,” the caller said, had “just been shot while in the Baltimore and Potomac.” When they learned what had happened, the members of Bell’s family were struck by the cruelty and senselessness of the act, and reminded of the losses they had suffered in their own lives. As his mother would write in the following days, there was a sense of shock and grief, as heavy as if the president “belonged to us.”
The Volta Laboratory was on Connecticut Avenue, a main thoroughfare in the heart of Washington, and Tainter and Bell’s cousin Dr. Chicester Bell watched as the city seemed to descend into madness. People flooded the streets, dodging carriage wheels and horses’ hooves as they raced toward the train station in disbelief, or away from it in terror. “Everybody ran hither and thither without method,” one contemporary writer would remember of that day. “Men forgot hat and coat, and ran into the streets and wandered about, apparently anxious only to be near somebody else, but shocked and bewildered.” Determined to find out for himself what had happened, Tainter began to make his way toward the Baltimore and Potomac. So crowded and chaotic were the streets, however, that by the time he reached the train station, Garfield was already gone.
In Boston, Bell had been in frequent contact with Tainter, as they worked long distance. His wife, pregnant with their third child, and his daughters needed him, but his thoughts had never been far from his work. As soon as he heard the news of the president’s shooting, however, Bell’s mind immediately shifted away from Edison’s phonograph, and even his own invention, the photophone, to the president. Although he was not a doctor, Bell knew that, in the case of a gunshot wound, “no one could venture to predict the end so long as the position of the bullet remained unknown.” It sickened him to think of Garfield’s doctors blindly “search[ing] with knife and probe” for Guiteau’s bullet. “Science,” he reasoned, “should be able to discover some less barbarous method.”
Science would soon exceed even Bell’s expectations. Had Garfield been shot just fifteen years later, the bullet in his back would have been quickly found by X-ray images, and the wound treated with antiseptic surgery. He might have been back on his feet within weeks. Had he been able to receive modern medical care, he likely would have spent no more than a few nights in the hospital.
Even had Garfield simply been left alone, he almost certainly would have survived. Lodged as it was in the fatty tissue below and behind his pancreas, the bullet itself was no continuing danger to the president. “Nature did all she could to restore him to health,” a surgeon would write just a few years later. “She caused a capsule of thick, strong, fibrous tissue to be formed around the bullet, completely walling it off from the rest of the body, and rendering it entirely harmless.”
Garfield’s doctors did not know where the bullet was, but they did know that it was not necessarily fatal. Just sixteen years after the end of the Civil War, hundreds of men, Union veterans and Confederate, were walking around with lead balls inside them. Many of the soldiers, moreover, had sustained wounds that seemed almost impossible to survive. For the better part of his life, the man who delivered Guiteau to the District Jail, Detective McElfresh, had had a bullet in his brain, a wound also sustained during the Civil War. He appeared to be, one reporter mentioned offhandedly, “none the worse for it.”