Book Discussion - Destiny of the Republic

For this meeting, we’ll be discussing Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. A tightly written history of how the assassination of James Garfield collided with 19th-century politics, medical incompetence, and one of the most grotesque failures in American public life.

Length: 354 pages | ~10 hrs audiobook

Book Description

When President James A. Garfield was shot in 1881, the bullet itself was not immediately fatal. What followed was months of suffering driven by political dysfunction, media frenzy, and doctors who confidently applied disastrously outdated medical practices. Candice Millard tells the intertwined story of Garfield, his deranged assassin Charles Guiteau, and the state of American medicine at the dawn of the modern age.

The book is as much about how power, ego, and bad science can kill as it is about the murder of a president, and it makes a strong case that Garfield was effectively finished off by his doctors, not his shooter.

Here's a lecture given by the author, if you haven't finished the book but still want to have full context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aHBCPNAKB0&pp=ygUhZGVzdGlueSBvZiB0aGUgcmVwdWJsaWMgaW50ZXJ2aWV3