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 over the first time he fired it. Guiteau's pistol was recovered after the assassination, and even photographed by the Smithsonian in the early 20th century, but it has since been lost. On one occasion, Guiteau trailed Garfield to the railway station as the President was seeing his wife off to a beach resort in Long Branch, New Jersey, but he decided to postpone his plan because Garfield's wife Lucretia was in poor health and Guiteau did not want to upset her. Having been alerted to the president's schedule by a newspaper article, on July 2, 1881, he lay in wait