Startseite
Podcasts
This Feels Criminal: A True Crime Podcast (Formerly Killer Queens) Podcast
Assassination of James Garfield: The Bullet Didn't Kill Him | Pt. 1

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

This Feels Criminal: A True Crime Podcast (Formerly Killer Queens) vor 2 Monaten

0:00

38:41

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.