INTRODUCTION
James Garfield (1831-1881), the 20th President of the United States, served only a few months of his four-year term of office before being shot twice from behind. On July 2, 1881, while the President and his wife were waiting at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C., an assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, found a chink in police security and acted. Two bullets struck Garfield. One grazed his hand; the other hit him dead center just below his ribs. Garfield yelled in pain and asked those standing near him what happened. He did not fall to the ground but returned to the White House for treatment of the wound. Guiteau was immediately arrested while the smoking gun was still in his hand.
A year later, both men will be dead. They will have been autopsied, had their internal organs removed, put in jars, pickled, and put on public display.
A nineteenth-century collection of microscope slides was recently found in the attic of a Maryland home. The collection contained slides made by it’s most likely original owner, M. D. Luehrs of Cleveland, Ohio. Additionally, it held slides made by W. B. Rezner, an American Civil War surgeon and President of the Cleveland Microscopy Society. Two of Rezner’s slides were labeled “President James Garfield’s Lung. The President’s lungs were removed during an autopsy conducted by J. J. Woodward, an American Civil War surgeon, microscopy enthusiast and agent of the United States Army Medical Museum. The details of how both the President and his assassin lost their internal organs follows.
Charles Guiteau (1841 – 1882) was a somewhat down-on-his-heels attorney. He supported Garfield during the presidential campaign and volunteered with the President’s election team. Garfield won the election, and Guiteau believed he deserved a reward, such as a governmental position, like an ambassadorship to France. He wrote increasingly demanding letters to Garfield requesting a post. The President’s staff, however, dismissed him as a crackpot. Embittered, Guiteau bought a gun and began stalking Garfield’s movements.
It has since been argued but never settled that Garfield might have been able to recover from being shot had the bullet’s entry wound been cleaned and left to heal while leaving the projectile to become encapsulated. But his doctors were obsessed with searching for the bullet inside his body. Garfield clung to life for eighty days. During this time, the President’s physicians repeatedly reopened the bullet’s entry wound to probe for the missing projectile. The primary surgical tool they used for their explorations were unwashed fingers. The germ theory of disease was becoming accepted during the 1870s. Iin England, Lister’s antiseptic operating techniques were being implemented with stellar success. But in the U.S., hand cleaning and antiseptic methodologies were still a contentious issues, particularly among surgeons hardened in the blood and guts hellscape of civil war hospital tents.
Garfield steadily grew weaker and lost weight as infections spread through his body. He went from his normal weight of 210 pounds to 130 so his doctors began experimenting with rectal feeding. Even Alexander Graham Bell, a medical doctor and inventor of the telephone, had a go at Garfield. Bell was developing a metal detector and brought a prototype to the White House to search of the recalcitrant bullet. Unfortunately, Garfield’s mattress contained metal springs, and the physicians in charge refused to allow their patient to be moved. Signals generated by the mattress springs obscured the selectivity of Bell’s metal detector, so the bullet’s whereabouts remained unknown. Nevertheless, Bell’s device was workable and became a useful tool for pinpointing the location of bullets and shrapnel buried in wounded soldiers during the Spanish American War and WWI.
President Garfield died on September 19, 1881, allowing physicians free rein in plying their craft. Prowling about the President’s opened abdomen, they found the assassin’s bullet. The projectile was above his pancreas, nestling against the pancreatic artery. It came to rest there because Garfield’s backbone deflected its trajectory to the left side of the body. The physicians had been acting on the assumption it continued in a straight line and consequently focused their exploratory probing on the President’s right side. Part of the autopsy required removing Garfield’s liver, stomach, heart, and lungs and placing them in preservatives. The physicians dissected out a length of the President’s backbone where the bullet entered his body. The physicians defleshed, cleaned and mounted the vertebra on a board. Then they sent the collage to the Army Medical Museum for public display. At the museum, a. curator inserted a rod through the channel blown out by the bullet to make visible its trajectory and installed it in a glass case. Garfield’s backbone became a permanent museum exhibited until the year 2000, when it was moved into the museum’s storage collection in response to a shift in public sensitivities. Garfield’s organs, which had been placed in preservatives, were transferred to museum jars and also given to the Army Medical Museum for exhibition. In 1997 the preserved organs were sent to Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery and placed with the President’s body which was ensconced in a 165-foot-tall memorial.
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In 1862, during the American Civil War, Surgeon General William Hammond established the Army Medical Museum as a center for collecting specimens for research in combat medicine and surgery. In 1889 the name was changed to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in 1989.
In 1921, the Army Medical Museum transferred Garfield’s organs to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, where they remained on display until the 1970s. At that time, the organs were returned to the Garfield family, and they were interred with Garfield’s body in his memorial at Lake View Cemetery.
Charles Guiteau was hanged for murder, on June 30, 1882, in Washington D.C. Most of his body was buried in the prison yard where he was executed. Missing from his mortal remains was his head. That was sent to the Army Medical Museum where his brain and skull were exhibited.
Guiteau’s brain was examined by several prominent physicians and scientists of the time, including Dr. Edward Curtis Spitzka, a notable neurologist and psychiatrist. Dr. Spitzka conducted extensive research on Guiteau’s brain and concluded that there were no significant abnormalities could be found that might explain his violent behavior toward President Garfield. due to changing attitudes towards the display of human remains, the brain was moved to the museum’s storage collection.
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Other Famous Individual’s Body Parts On Display
Albert Einstein’s Brain
After Einstein’s death on April 18, 1955, Dr. Thomas Stoltz Harvey, a pathologist at Princeton Hospital who had performed Einstein’s autopsy, removed his brain without the permission of his family. Harvey claimed that Einstein had permitted this before his death, but his family did consent afterward.
Harvey dissected and photographed Einstein’s brain extensively. He made over 240 histological sections of the brain and mounted them on microscope slides, and distributed them to researchers around the world. Unfortunately, many of them were lost or damaged over time.
Harvey kept the rest of the brain in jars of formalin for further study, but he was fired from his job at Princeton Hospital for performing autopsies on bodies he was not authorized to look at. One of those was a friend of the hospital’s Chief of Staff.
After Harvey died in 2007, his remaining brain samples were sent from Princeton to the National Museum of Medicine in Maryland. A set of Harvey’s slides were given to the Historical Collections at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and to the Mutter Medical Museum in Philadelphia, where they are still on display.
John F. Kennedy’s Brain With President John F. Kennedy’s brain the opposite is true. His brain can not be displayed because it has been lost. No one involved with the President’s autopsy, its documentation, and the following embalming process knows what happened to his brain. President Kennedy was interred with an empty skull. Its disappearance was revealed to the public in the mid-1970s by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, ten years following the assassination. There were other anatomical items removed from Kennedy’s body by physicians during his autopsy. They were accurately recorded and accounted for as being transferred to the National Archives, where they still remain. (1)
(1) https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/oct/21/presidents-brain-missing-mislaid-body-parts
Four American presidents have been assassinated by gunshot:
- Abraham Lincoln, who was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, and died the following day.
- James A. Garfield, who was shot by Charles J. Guiteau on July 2, 1881, and died from his wounds on September 19, 1881.
- William McKinley, who was shot by Leon Czolgosz on September 6, 1901, and died from his wounds on September 14, 1901.
- John F. Kennedy, who was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963, and died from his wounds shortly thereafter.
Yes, during the autopsy of President William McKinley, several of his organs were removed for examination. The autopsy was conducted by a team of six doctors, led by Dr. Herman Mynter, and lasted about two hours.
According to historical accounts, the autopsy revealed that one of the bullets fired by Leon Czolgosz had perforated McKinley’s stomach, pancreas, and kidney before lodging in muscles near his back. The doctors decided to remove these organs for further examination, which was a common practice in autopsies at the time.
After the examination, McKinley’s organs were placed in jars of formalin and sent to the Army Medical Museum (now the National Museum of Health and Medicine) in Washington, D.C. The museum later returned the organs to McKinley’s family, who buried them in a private ceremony in Canton, Ohio.
Ref.
McQueen commemorative microphotgraphs of Garfield and his wife.
M
W. B. Resner 306 Euclid Ave. Clevleand
Luehrs, M. D. Superintendent of Clevland Machinery Depot. 412 Lake
Online autopsy report.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/official-bulletin-the-autopsy-the-body-president-garfield
William B. Rezner M.D. (d. 1883) was a physician, surgeon, founding member and eventurally and president of the Cleveland Microscopical Society. In an obituary, published in the society’s journal by its secretary C.M. Vorce, Rezner had been a practitioner of microscopy for twenty years. This means he began working with microscopes while serving as a surgeon during the American Civil War. Most likely he was trying to understand the human body on the microscopic level. During the war the Army Medical Museum was established. One of the needs the new institution was to fulfill was the collection of information about war injuries and their treatment outcomes. The Museum requested surgeons working in the field to collect examples of bullet and shrapnel injuries and send them to their doctors for study. This may have initiated a relationship between W. B. Rezner and physicians at the Army Medical Museum. As the museum was also the repository for the organs of Garfield after his autopsy it suggests a possible pathway for the President’s lung tissue to have found its way into the microscope societes and indicated by the Detroit Journal report of 1890.
In the obiturary Vorce also credits Rezner as the first microscopist to visually resolve 120,000 lines to the inch. He shared the accomplishment publicly by setting up an exhibit microscope at the Buffalo meeting of the American Society of Microscopists so all could see for themselves. The article additionally states that Rezner invented a technique to silver plate micrometer lines with silver. No other information about his methodology is given, but it is remarked that once that has been done, seeing the fine linings is easily done.
Rezner was a surgeon during the American Civil War in the volunteer service. At the thirteenth reunion of the sixth cavalry Rezner was elected to serve as president of the association with the next reunion scheduled for 1880 Rezner was serving on the executive committee of the American Society of Microscopists.
Detroit Michigan May 16 Detroit Journal published the statement that a portion of the lungs of President Garfield were taken at the tie of the autopsy and cut up and distributed among microscopists. Upon being interviewed as to the foundation for the statements the Journal states that it know of persons in Detroit have have such portions in their possession. Associated Press Dispatch
printed in Microscopical bulletin and Science News Feb. 1890 Published James W. Queen 924 Chestnut st. Philadelphia
Vorce, C. M. (1883) The American Microscopical Journal Boston, June 1883 No.6 Vol IV
Luehrs had filed patents for a screw swaging machine and a bolt cutter in the News-Herald Nov 23, 1893
William B. Rezner M.D. (d. 1883) was a physician, surgeon, founding member of the Cleveland Microscopical Society, and eventually its President. In an obituary published in the society’s Journal by its secretary C.M. Vorce, at the time of his death, Rezner had been a practitioner of microscopy for twenty years, meaning he began working with microscopes while serving as a surgeon during the American Civil War. Most likely, he was trying to understand the human body on the microscopic level. During the war, the Army Medical Museum was established. One of the needs the new institution was created to fulfill was collecting information about war injuries and their treatment outcomes. The Museum requested surgeons working in the field to collect examples of bullet and shrapnel injuries and send them to their doctors for study. Doing so may have initiated a relationship between W. B. Rezner and physicians at the Army Medical Museum. Since the Museum was also the repository for the organs of Garfield after his autopsy, it opened a possible pathway for the President’s lung tissue to have found its way into the microscopic societies, as indicated by the Detroit Journal’s report of 1890 and explained how Rezner obtained Garfield’s lung tissue that he mounted under his own label.
In the obituary, Vorce credits Rezner as the first microscopist to resolve 120,000 lines to the inch visually. He publicly shared the accomplishment by setting up a demonstration microscope at the Buffalo meeting of the American Society of Microscopists for all to see and confirm. The article also states that Rezner invented a method for silver plating micrometer lines. No other information about the methodology is given, but it does note that seeing the fine linings is easy once the technique is used.
At the thirteenth reunion of the sixth cavalry, Rezner was elected president of the association, with the next reunion scheduled for 1880. Rezner was serving on the executive committee of the American Society of Microscopists.
Detroit, Michigan, May 16 The Detroit Journal published the statement that a portion of the lungs of President Garfield was taken at the time of the autopsy and cut up and distributed among microscopists. Upon being interviewed as to the foundation for the claim, the Journal states that it knows of persons in Detroit who have such portions in their possession. Associated Press Dispatch
printed in Microscopical bulletin and Science News Feb. 1890 Published James W. Queen 924 Chestnut st. Philadelphia
Woodward served in the U.S. Civil War as Army Assistant Surgeon and produced several publications on war-related diseases. He was also a microscopist known worldwide[1] and an instrumental pioneer in photo-microscopy.
A collection of his photo-micrographs are preserved at the Royal Microscopical Society in the UK. Woodward performed and wrote reports on the autopsies of both Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. He also attended to president Garfield after he was shot. A collection of bulletins on Garfield’s condition issued by the attending physicians is held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.[2]
According to a website run by the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory: “Woodward was the first scientist to establish photomicrography as a tool for both scientific and medical investigations.” According to an article in the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine:[3] “In addition to collecting specimens for the museum’s archive, he co-authored the definitive medical history of the Civil War in the 6-volume 1870 publication of the MSHWR.4 Woodward’s technique using aniline dyes for staining thin sections of tissue, along with his pioneering work in photomicroscopy, helped prepare the groundwork for modern surgical pathology.”
In 1881, Woodward served as president of the Philosophical Society of Washington.[4] He was also a curator of certain sections of the Army Medical Museum.
In conjunction with Dr. John H. Brinton, of Philadelphia, he was assigned to the duty of collecting materials for a Medical and Surgical History of the War and for a Military Medical Museum. At the end of the war he was placed in charge of the pension divi
https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/oct/21/presidents-brain-missing-mislaid-body-parts