The Death of the President

     When President McKinley was struck down by the cowardly assasin [sic] the whole earth wept and the sun hid its face. When finally his gentle spirit took its flight the veil of national and religious prejudices was rent in twain long enough for prince and pope to utter sympathy and murmer [sic] prayer for the welfare of his soul. The manhood of the average American will not permit him, even in imagination, to descend to the murky depths in which must grovel so vile a reptile as he who assaulted our chief magistrate. In a time of prosperity, of political peace, of moral and material advancement; So [sic] kindly a soul, so pure a man, so loving a husband, so conscientious a statesman, the arch fiends of hell must already gloat in anticipation of the fires of agony and remorse in store for the murderer.
     The homeopathic profession will always hold in pleasant remembrance the graciousness of President McKinley at the monument exercises and at the public reception given to the Institute in Washington. They will regret also that the skill of the surgeon in his last illness had not been backed up by the sure remedies of Samuel Hahnemann.
     Now that the story of his sufferings has been told and the autopsy has shown wherein the surgeons failed we cannot agree that his case was hopeless. It seems strange that at the time of the operation no attempt was made to follow the course of the bullet, and if impossible to extract it, as it appears to have been, to make at least a reasonable guess as to what other organs beside the stomach had been injured. Strange, too, it seems if the kidney was so badly wounded that some one of the scientific tests applied in such profusion did not indicate it. Was it over confidence [sic] or ignorance on the part of those in charge that led them to issue statement after statement, declaring the distinguished patient was doing so well, when all the time his rapid pulse showed a sympathetic nervous system staggering under a death blow? The gangrene found after death would not have occurred in a man whose sympathetic ganglia had not been knocked down and failed to rise again. It is pos- [216][217] sible that suppuration might have taken place in the track of the wound in any one [sic], but supperration [sic] would not have killed so soon. Plainly it was his circulation that was at fault, and his circulation was that of a weak man without vitality, and a wounded nervous system. Would that the surgeons had recognized it and had called upon a deciple [sic] of Hahnemann to have furnished the remedy!
     The suggestion has been seriously made that the bullet which remained in the body of the President had been poisoned and had in that way been responsible for his death. There is no evidence whatever that such was the case. Had the poison been on the bullet in large doses, death would have resulted quickly. Smaller doses might have so weakened him at first that recovery could not have taken place because of previous exhaustion. Of course the inevitable germ has been thust [sic] to the front and is now claiming the right to be heard. He escaped scorching when the powder exploded, he hung on tight while passing through the President’s clothes and invited others to come with him. Once lodged in the tissues, he immediately set to work to produce gangrene—so his advocates say. This, of course, is according to the approved theories of to-day. Where, though, does the personal equation, the President’s vitality come in? what [sic] were the leucocytes doing? What had become of the vis medicatrix naturae?