Bliss had done “more to cast distrust upon American surgery than any time heretofore known to our medical history,” one doctor wrote. Young surgeons, especially, were scornfully critical of Bliss’s care. “None of the injuries inflicted by the assassin’s bullet were necessarily fatal,” wrote Arpad Gerster, a thirty-three-year-old New York surgeon who had recently been in Europe, studying the “Listerian method of wound treatment,” and would write the first American surgical textbook based on that method. To the physicians of his generation, Gerster continued, Garfield’s death proved with
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