Which president was shot twice but died from an infection

President James A. Garfield was shot twice on July 2, 1881, at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C., by Charles J. Guiteau, a disgruntled office-seeker who had been rejected for a diplomatic position. One bullet grazed Garfield's arm, but the second bullet lodged deep in his back near his spine. Remarkably, Garfield survived the initial shooting and lived for another 79 days, during which time doctors made repeated attempts to locate and remove the bullet using unsterilized instruments and probes, inadvertently introducing infections into the wounds. The lack of understanding about antiseptic practices at that time—this was before Joseph Lister's antiseptic methods were widely adopted in America—meant that doctors' repeated poking and prodding created massive infections.

Garfield's condition deteriorated over the summer of 1881 as infection spread throughout his body, causing blood poisoning (septicemia) and eventually leading to his death on September 19, 1881. Modern medical analysis suggests that Garfield might have survived the gunshot wounds if they had been left alone or treated with proper antiseptic technique, making his death as much a result of medical malpractice and ignorance of germ theory as of the assassination attempt itself. Alexander Graham Bell even invented a metal detector to try to locate the bullet in Garfield's body, but it failed due to the metal bed frame the president was lying on. Garfield's prolonged suffering and death from infection rather than the immediate effects of the gunshot wounds made his assassination particularly tragic and highlighted the primitive state of American medical practice at the time. His death contributed to eventual reforms in civil service (as Guiteau's motivation was related to the spoils system) and increased awareness of medical hygiene.