The Third Curator
The stupendous task of compiling and writing the Medical and Surgical History was drawing to its close when, in May 1877, Dr. Otis suffered a stroke of paralysis, and in May 1880, Dr. Woodward was compelled by the state of his health to go to Europe. On 23 February 1881, Dr. Otis died, at the early age of 51, and was succeeded as Curator of the Museum by Surgeon David Low Huntington, U.S.A. (fig. 29), who also took over the task of completing the third and final part of the surgical volumes of the great History upon which Dr. Otis was engaged at the time of his disability and death. 31[1]
Back from Europe, Woodward suffered a broken leg on 1 January 1881, when his horse slipped and fell on him, but he was able to resume work at the Museum in time to be one of the physicians attending President James A. Garfield, when the President was shot and fatally wounded by Charles J. Guiteau on 2 July 1881. The shooting took place in the waiting room of the Baltimore & Potomac railroad depot in Washington, where the President had gone to board a train to join his wife on the New Jersey seashore. The first shot from Guiteau's pistol grazed the President's arm; the second entered his back and was not located until after his death on 19 September 1881. Probing failed to find it, as did an "induction-balance" device of Prof. Alexander Graham Bell which was supposed to locate metal objects by an electrically induced sound. Every-thing known to the medical art of 1881 was tried, but in the prevailing state of medical knowledge, there was nothing that could be done to save the President's life.
The Museum and the Garfield Tragedy
Eighteen hours after his death, in a seaside cottage at Elberon, N.J., where the President had been taken to escape the heat of Washington and the miasmas of the swamplands south of the White House, an autopsy was performed by Dr. Daniel Smith Lamb, pathologist of the Museum, with Dr. Woodward acting as recorder (fig. 30). The autopsy disclosed the course and location of the fatal bullet, which had entered the victim's back about 4 inches to the right of his spine ; had broken the eleventh and twelfth ribs to the right of the spine ; passed through the first lumbar vertebra, missing the spinal cord; grazed the splenic artery; and stopped behind the pancreas, some 10 inches from the point of
- ↑ 31 (1) Lamb, op. cit., pp. 77, 80-82. (2) Lamb, The Military Surgeon, 53 (1923), p. 127.
