Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station held at Platz's Saloon. On July 2, 1881, it was announced in the local newspapers that President James A. Garfield would be leaving for his summer vacation. En route to board a train to New Jersey, he was shot in the back by assassin Charles Guiteau while walking across the lobby of the Baltimore and Potomac station with James G. Blaine. While the president survived the initial shooting, doctors subsequently probed his wounds with non-sterilized objects in a frantic search for the bullet. The bacterial infections they introduced to the wound were the likely cause of his eventual death in
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