#438 James Garfield's Extraordinary Rise

At just 44 years of age, he'd already defied all odds. Born into extreme poverty in a log cabin in rural Ohio and fatherless before his second birthday, he had risen quickly through the layers of society, not with aggression or even ambition, but with a passionate love of learning that would define his life. Garfield was a former professor of ancient languages, literature and mathematics, who had paid for his first year of college by working as a janitor. Garfield's interests and abilities were as deep as they were broad. In fact, so detailed was his interest in mathematics that he had recently written an original proof that the New England Journal of Education had published just a month before. The journal was astonished that a member of Congress had written it. In Garfield's experience, education was salvation. It had freed him from grinding poverty. It had shaped his mind, forged paths, and created opportunities where once there had been none. So that is an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Destiny of the Republic, a tale of madness, medicine, and the murder of a president, and it was written by Candace Miller. Candace Miller is one of my favorite authors. She wrote this book called A River of Doubt, I covered all the way back on episode 175. It's about Theodore Roosevelt. It's a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, And then she also wrote a biography of the first, I think, twenty five or twenty six years of Winston Churchill's life. It's called Hero of the Empire and that is episode three nineteen. And so before picking up this book, and I picked it up because Candace wrote it, I did not know much about James Garfield. He was the twentieth president of The United States. He was only president for one hundred and ninety nine days before he was assassinated. So the book is about the... His early life, the assassination, and then the fact that he would have survived if he had access to modern medicine. So there's another guy in the book that plays a prominent role. It's guy named Joseph Lister. He's the one that went across the world trying to educate doctors that you need to wash your hands, that you're actually infecting, that infection, you're putting your dirty, unsterilized, the equipment they use to maybe operate on your patients, that is what's actually... You're inducing infection, that's what actually is killing the people. This is exactly what happened to James Garfield. But what was more remarkable, again, I didn't know much about him before I picked up the book, so I'm just gonna give you a brief overview of his life before I jump back into the book. It is incredible. So it says, he was one of the most remarkable self made figures in American presidential history. He was born into poverty in a log cabin in Ohio. He became a teacher, a …