The Garfield Assassination Altered American History, But Is Woefully Forgotten Today (Smithsonian)

[Pluvious]

Short, but interesting piece.

Amazing how much history we forget, and so quickly.

Why we need to have a historical marker on the site where Charles Guiteau shot the President in 1881

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/garfield-assassination-altered-american-history-woefully-forgotten-today-180968319/

[snowybirdie]

1. PBS

had an excellent biography. Believe it's on Netflix or Amazon now

[Dennis Donovan]

5. Murder of a President on American Experience

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/garfield/

[hlthe2b]

2. I've always known it happend, but never the details... thanks

[Sneederbunk]

3. It is an event that the medical profession would like to forget.

[Aristus]

4. Actually, we prefer that it be remembered, so that the conditons which led to Garfield's death

from infection will not occur again.

The medical field is intensely conservative in many respects, not the least of which is the mindset that proclaims "This is the way we have always done it. Why change it?" Read about Ignatz Semmelweis and his struggles to make regular handwashing a requirement for the doctors under his supervision.

But we do make progress. And we maintain that progress by remembering the bad, and celebrating the good.

[Hortensis]

6. i read a biography about Semmelweis, fascinating,

and horrifying. It's been a long time, but I remember that at one point so many poor women died in his city's maternity hospital that women in labor hid and begged for their lives not to be taken there, even to be allowed to give birth outside and enter after.

And that slowness to adopt his findings meant he died in despair after a mental breakdown, of an infected wound in a hospital. If only he could have known.