President James Garfield was shot twice in the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station by Charles Guiteau. One of the physicians who visited him in the station, before he was transported back to the White House, was Charles Burleigh Purvis. Purvis was one of the founders of the Howard University Medical School, a historically black university.
Another attending doctor, a white man named Dr. Bliss, couldn’t locate the bullet in the President’s back. Without administering anesthesia Bliss used an unsterilized probe, then an unsterilized finger, in order to search for the bullet in Garfield’s back. Candice Miller, in her book The Destiny of the Republic, discusses the event at length. “With a boldness then extraordinary in a black doctor when addressing a white one,” she says, Purvis asked Dr. Bliss to end his brutal examination. Miller asserts that it was the infection introduced during this and future examinations which ultimately claimed the President’s life. Purvis never saw Garfield once they removed the President from the station.
Purvis would go on to be nominated by then-President Chester Arthur to be surgeon-in-charge at the Freedmens hospital, the first African-American to head a civilian hospital.
