President Garfield, Alexander Bell and the bullet | David Abernethy

Foster Kennedy mentioned Horsley using a bullet probe to successfully locate and remove a bullet from the head of an attempted suicide. It caught my attention because FK clearly did not understand how the probe worked. In an effort to find out, I found it described by MacKenzie Davidson, an early radiologist/physicist, in the BMJ in 1900 but he reported he thought he heard about it in the Lancet many years earlier and built one himself, but the trail went cold.

I managed to discover Alexander Graham Bell’s failed attempts to use a metal detector to help the surgeons locate the bullet during President Garfield’s lingering death from an assassin’s bullet wound, and the mysterious and forgotten development of the telephonic bullet probe. For the rest of the story and its trail through the correspondence pages of the BMJ, Lancet (the Twitter of their day), the New York Times and Scientific American see you at the talk!