The Mental Status Of Guiteau The Assassin Of President Garfield

Examines one of America's lesser-known presidents, his assassination, and the life of Charles Guiteau, who killed him.

In this brilliant study, Charles Rosenberg uses the celebrated trial of Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President Garfield in 1881, to explore insanity and criminal responsibility in the Gilded Age. Rosenberg masterfully reconstructs the courtroom battle waged by twenty-four expert witnesses who represented the two major schools of psychiatric thought of the generation immediately preceding Freud. Although the role of genetics in behavior was widely accepted, these psychiatrists fiercely debated whether heredity had predisposed Guiteau to assassinate Garfield. Rosenberg's account allows us to consider one of the opening rounds in the controversy over the criminal responsibility of the insane, a debate that still rages today.

Excerpt from A Complete History of the Life and Trial of Charles Julius Guiteau, Assassin of President Garfield: A Graphic Sketch of His Erratic Career as Detailed (Expressly for This Work) By His Former Wife, Mrs. Dunmire The assassin, Charles Guiteau, has narrated the story of his life. TO print it entire would demand an immense amount of space. In a literary point of view, the work is of no value whatever. As the record of a man who will stand in all our his tory as one Of the greatest of our criminals, it possesses a special interest and importance. Gui teau, in a series of interviews, dictated the work which follows, and the passages within quotation marks contain the exact language which he used, as taken down by a shorthand writer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.