Charles Burleigh Purvis very successful at Howard, and was credited with keeping the medical department running during the financial panic of 1873. He attended President Garfield after he was shot by an assassin on July 2, 1881. This made him the first black physician to attend to a sitting president. Later in 1881 he was appointed by President Chester Arthur to Surgeon-in-Charge at the Freedmen's hospital. Purvis was surgeon-in-charge at the Freedmen's Hospital from October 1, 1881, to 1894, and in that role was the first black person to head a hospital under civilian authority. In a letter from 1908, Purvis stated he
James Rudolph Garfield witnessed the shooting of their father by disgruntled office-seeker Charles J. Guiteau at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington. The President and his sons were waiting for a train en route to Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where young James had been recently accepted, when the shooting took place. Following his father's death on September 19, 1881, he studied at Williams College. He received his A.B. degree in 1885, and then attended Columbia Law School. In 1888, he was admitted to the Ohio bar and established the Cleveland, Ohio-based law firm of Garfield and Garfield, with his brother