Tiffany O'Callaghan, CultureLab editor
BY THE late 1870s, antisepsis was widely used in Europe. But across the Atlantic, Joseph Lister's ideas about using carbolic acid to sterilise surgical tools were still greeted with scepticism - and often ridicule. When Lister travelled to Philadelphia for the Centennial exhibition of 1876, he gained little traction with visitors awed by new surgical gadgetry but wary of fanciful notions of invisible germs.
This was unfortunate for James Garfield, a scholar-politician thrust against his will into the US presidential race and shot by a deranged fanatic just weeks after his inauguration. Afterwards, his physician and a gaggle of surgeons were poking unclean implements - and fingers - into Garfield's wound in a vain search for the bullet. The resulting sepsis killed him.
This grim tale forms the centrepiece of Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic, in which she expertly weaves the events of that era into a driving narrative about the Garfield saga.
We learn, for example, that at the same exhibition in which Lister failed to make an impact, a little-known inventor was grabbing attention with his new device, the telephone.
After Garfield was gunned down, Alexander Graham Bell applied his scientific skills in an attempt to save him, working ceaselessly in his lab to design a system that would detect the bullet. As we now know, it was not enough.
Millard's exquisite storytelling celebrates Garfield's oft-forgotten legacy, and asks what kind of leader he would have become had he survived. It also inspires enormous gratitude for the medical and scientific advances that have largely confined Garfield's particular fate to history.
Book information
Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
Published by: Doubleday
Price: $28.95
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