James A. Garfield (#20)

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) was the 20th President of the United States and the second president to be assassinated — shot by Charles J. Guiteau at a Washington train station on July 2, 1881, just four months into his presidency. Garfield was a genuinely remarkable man: born into poverty in a log cabin in Ohio, he was largely self-educated, became a college president at 26, served as a Union general in the Civil War, and was simultaneously elected to the House and Senate before accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1880.

Garfield's death is one of history's great medical tragedies. The bullet itself — which lodged near his spine — was probably not fatal. But his doctors, probing the wound repeatedly with unsterilized fingers and instruments in defiance of Joseph Lister's recently published germ theory, introduced catastrophic infections. Despite Alexander Graham Bell's attempt to locate the bullet with a metal detector (frustrated by the metal springs in Garfield's mattress), the president died on September 19, 1881 — 79 days after being shot — primarily from the infections caused by his medical treatment. His assassination led directly to the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, ending the spoils system that had motivated his killer.