George Miller Beard the military and Georges Gilles de la Tourette. Beard was also involved extensively with electricity as a medical treatment, and published extensively on the subject. He was a champion of many reforms of psychiatry, and was a founder of the National Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Prevention of Insanity. He also took an unpopular stance against the death penalty for persons with mental illness, going so far as to campaign for leniency for Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield on the basis that the man was not guilty because of insanity. Beard became
Charles J. Guiteau Arbor, Michigan, in order to attend the University of Michigan. Due to inadequate academic preparation, he failed the entrance examinations. Despite cramming in French and algebra at Ann Arbor High School, during which time he received numerous letters from his father concerning his progress, he quit, and in June 1860 joined the utopian religious sect the Oneida Community, in Oneida, New York, with which Guiteau's father already had close affiliations. According to Brian Resnick of "The Atlantic", Guiteau "worshiped" the group's founder, John Humphrey Noyes, once writing that he had "perfect, entire and absolute confidence in him in all things".