Julia Sand she once asked Arthur for permission to paint him in watercolors. Julia Sand wrote her first letter when she was thirty-one. Dated August 27, 1881, it reached Arthur when he was still U.S. Vice President. Arthur's predecessor, President James A. Garfield, had been shot by Charles Guiteau; it took nearly two months for Garfield to die, during which time Vice-President Arthur was in seclusion. Upon being caught, Guiteau had announced his hope that Arthur would be president and there was a brief investigation into whether Guiteau had been hired by Garfield's enemies. Though this was disproven, there were threats to
Charles J. Guiteau storage by the museum. Parts of Guiteau's brain remain on display in a jar at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton said in 1881 that he believed that Guiteau was sane when he assassinated Garfield. An autopsy of Guiteau's brain revealed that his dura mater was abnormally thick, suggesting he may have had neurosyphillis, a disease which causes mental instability; he could have contracted the disease from a prostitute. George Paulson, formerly the chair of neurology at Ohio State University, disputed the neurosyphillis diagnosis, arguing that Guiteau suffered from both schizophrenia and "grandiose narcissism". In 2014, the