President Garfield expired at 10.35 on Monday, without pain and
without utterance. He had been asleep till shortly after 10 p.m., then woke up, complaining of pain in his heart, and the pulse failing, sank into unconsciousness till he passed away. The immediate cause of death was the rupture of an artery, eaten through by an abscess. it is now known that the recovery of the President was from the first an impossibility, and the post-mortem revealed facts not credit- able to the condition of American surgery. The diagnosis of the case had been wrong from beginning to end, for the bullet, fracturing the eleventh rib on the right side, "passed through the spinal column in front of the spinal canal," breaking the first lumbar vertebra in pieces, and imbedding the fragments in the neighbouring flesh. The bullet lodged "below the pancreas, about two and a half inches to the left of the spine, and behind the peritoneum." With a spine shat- tered into pieces, each one of which became a separate centre of irritation, and blood-poisoning so severe that a single abscess was six inches by four inches, recovery was hopeless, and all the bulletins inaccurate. No man without a most excep- tional constitution and perfect nerve could have survived half the time, more especially as the emaciation was as great as is caused by protracted and fatal starvation. It is acknow- ledged now, moreover, that the President was aware, long before he quitted Washington, that he could not survive, and told his wife that he had ceased to wish for recovery.
