Given that Guiteau viewed himself as a Christian warrior employed by God and a key political operator of the 1880s, he clearly suffered from some sort of delusion. His family considered him insane, even attempting to have him institutionalized. Guiteau’s chief legal counsel (and brother-in-law), George Scoville, built his case on the idea that his client was not guilty by means of insanity, an uncommon defense in criminal murder trials during this period.
Scoville asked seven medical experts a long list of questions demonstrating the fragility of Guiteau’s mental state throughout his life and in 1881: “Assume it to be a fact that there was a strong hereditary taint of insanity in the blood of the prisoner at the bar … that during the month of June 1881, he became dominated by the idea that he was inspired of God to remove by death the president.” If these and other conditions were met, the lawyer continued, “state whether, in your opinion, the prisoner was sane or insane at the time of shooting President Garfield.”
The defense’s experts thought Guiteau was insane. The state and, ultimately, the American judiciary disagreed, ruling that he was in command of his faculties when he assassinated the president and therefore eligible for execution. Reflecting on the case in more recent decades, modern experts have largely agreed that the gunman suffered from mental illness, with some pathologists theorizing that he may have experienced adverse effects of chronic malaria and cerebral syphilis.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/94/12/9412c86a-c09c-49e3-bab8-6ceb42f81b22/2661px-garfield-casket.jpg)
The death of a president and the Chester A. Arthur administration
Garfield survived for 80 days after the shooting under the not-so-excellent care of Doctor Willard Bliss, whose first name matched his occupation. Bliss watched over the president with a vigilance that bordered on zealotry, going so far as to bar dissenting voices from the sickroom. After facing professional repercussions for his commitment to homeopathy, the controversial physician was reluctant to get caught up in a newfangled medical theory again. In Britain, the surgeon Joseph Lister had been raising awareness of antiseptic surgery for more than a decade, but Bliss saw no need to sterilize his tools before probing the inside of his patient.
For weeks, Bliss poked and prodded Garfield, reopening the wound every time he resumed his search for the bullet. Though Alexander Graham Bell offered to use his prototype metal detector to locate the projectile, the experiment proved unsuccessful, in large part because Bliss stopped the inventor from examining the president’s left side.
