Monthly Archives: August 2008

The man which was convicted and executed for killing President James Garfield back in 1882 argued that he didn’t kill the president because the president died due to his own doctor’s neglect. Was he right?

Guiteau shot the president with two bullets on the morning of July 2, 1881. Guiteau was a religious fanatic who figured if he shot the president he would unite the Republican Party and save the nation. One bullet grazed the president’s arm and the other was lodged somewhere in his body. The president was taken immediately to the White House to be treated by the “best emergency doctors.” But what happened for the next 10 weeks in the White House would prove to be the worst case of medical negligence and incompetence.

Garfield had several doctors treat him, they all guessed, and it was their guessing that killed him. The first doctor Willard Bliss put an unsterilized finger in the wound, and then inserted a probe to try and locate the bullet; this making the wound much larger. When the second set of doctors came the wound was much larger, and they themselves misdiagnosed where the bullet was. They claimed the bullet was lodged in the president’s liver. The third set of doctors which were surgeons poked around around the wound with unsterilized hands and actually punctured the liver!

The doctors were clueless, enter an inventor, Alexander Graham Bell was called. Mr. Bell came up with a crude metal detector which would be used to find the bullet. The surgeons operated when Mr. Bell declared that he had found the bullet. What he really found were the coil springs of the mattress! But before we burn Bell at the stake, coil springs were a rare and expensive luxury in the day, in fact, very little people knew what coil springs were. Graham was one of them.

By the time the surgeons operated, the wound had gone from three inches to twenty. The wound was horribly infected, and the president ended up dying of a massive heart attack. But the plot thickens; the surgeons said that the president died of a ruptured blood vessel in his stomach. However, the autopsy revealed that the bullet was in a fairly harmless position, well away from his spine. What is the irony here? The president would have lived if they had just left him alone.

One of history’s worse despot, the Emperor of Rome Caligula was so distraught about his sister Drusilla’s death that he imposed a national year of mourning. The citizens of Rome were not allowed to conduct business, eat with family, cut their hair, or even take a bath! Not for a day, or week, but for an entire year! Do you think the citizens obeyed? I would think so, if they didn’t he’d have them killed.

Caligula is best remembered for his weirdness, depravity, and cruelty. When he first became Emperor of Rome he called for “change” and everything seem promising. He later went on a downward spiral. Caligula got drunk on power. He is alleged to have had incestuous relationships with 3 of his sisters. But his favorite was Drusilla. He appointed his horse, Incitatus a member of the senate! In fact, he wanted Incitatus in a position of consul. When Rome ran out of convicts in the gladiator games, Caligula would throw a few spectators into the den of lions instead. In the late evening hours he’d pace the palace floors commanding the sun to rise. These are just a few of the Emperor’s insane actions. Basically Caligula terrorized his own country for a short, but in a sense long, 4 years.

Caligula was assassinated by his own guards in A.D. 41.

In 1860 president Lincoln walked into Corneau & Diller drug store in Springfield, Illinois and purchased 50 cents worth of Cocaine. The alkaloid had only been isolated from the cocoa plant 5 years earlier and had just been named “Cocaine,” by Albert Nieman a year before. Lincoln was one of the first Americans to use the new drug.

Harry E. Pratt found this fact when researching for his book, The Personal Finances of Abraham Lincoln published in 1943. Pratt studied Corneau & Diller’s order books and found that on October 12, 1860 an order was filled for Lincoln in the amount of 50 cents for Cocaine. In fact, other historians found in earlier order books from the same drug company, that the Lincoln family had bought other powerful drugs in 1853, and 1854. The drugs they purchased in 1853 and 1854 were camphorated opium tincture used at the time for its anti-diarrheal and pain relief properties. The main ingredient in this drug was Morphine, a highly addictive and dangerous drug. But one must understand that little was known about drugs and their side effects at the time. Mary Lincoln experienced depression, mood swings, and hallucinations due to the drug use.

Source: Curious Events in History
Michael Powell

Attention Glenn Miller fans… Remember that famous song PEnnyslvania 6-5000? Well did you know that this telephone number is said to be the oldest and continuing phone number in New York City? The number still belongs to the Hotel Pennsylvania where the Glenn Miller Orchestra played many times and where he got his inspiration for this song. Of course, the days of rotary phones are behind us and so the number reads 736-5000 now. In fact, the PE exchange was the first to switch from letters to number system.

The hotel has been around since 1919. Ah, if the walls could only speak.

We always see our 16th president, President Lincoln in pictures with the stovepipe hat, but did you know that not only was the stovepipe hat stylish for the day, but he used it for practical reasons as well? President Lincoln used to carry letters, bills, and notes in his hat. You can take a man out of the backwoods, but you can’t take the backwoods out of a man. Gee, I wonder if that’s where he carried the Gettysburg Address.

For more information on this visit encarta.com