Celebrities that would be dead today with 1700s healthcare

[Aurelius]

Regarding lincoln, by all accounts if he were similarly wounded in 2022 he would have surely perished. At best, they might have put him on life support in an irreversible coma for some period of time. John Wilkes Booth got him good, sadly.

On the flip side, I think that Garfield would’ve lived with modern healthcare though. Maybe McKinley as well.

Garfield 100% would have lived. Even with 1881 healthcare he'd have had good odds with most doctors.

After he died, the autopsy found the bullet on the side of the body the doctor had refused any attempts to search. A protective casing of tissue had formed around it and the surrounding organs were in generally good condition. On the other side of Garfield's body, where the doctor had obsessively searched for the bullet, there were little tunnels all throughout his body and these tunnels were full of all manner of infection and disgusting things.

[Aurelius]

Regarding lincoln, by all accounts if he were similarly wounded in 2022 he would have surely perished. At best, they might have put him on life support in an irreversible coma for some period of time. John Wilkes Booth got him good, sadly.

On the flip side, I think that Garfield would’ve lived with modern healthcare though. Maybe McKinley as well.

Oh, almost surely. It took several of the stupidest doctors of the 1880s kill Garfield off after several weeks of chronic malpractice even by the days standards.

One of the most simultaneously laughable and tragic facts about the Garfield assassination is the doctors use this newfangled device called a metal detector to try to locate the bullet in him. However, the device was clearly malfunctioning as everywhere over Garfield's body they scanned it registered positive for metal.

Garfield's mattress was lying on a metal frame.

Even better: after discovering the interference from the metal frame, the inventors (who included Alexander Graham Bell) revised their machine to account for the interference and cancel it out. They went back to the doctor (whose first name was Doctor, btw) and convinced him to let them do a second scan.

The doctor only let them scan one side of Garfield's body. The bullet was on the other side as discovered at the autopsy.

[Aurelius]

1800s healthcare was bad... 1700s healthcare was much worse. If Garfield had been shot in 1781 instead of 1881 I bet doctors would have tried to bleed him to relieve pressure on the wound or some BS and he would have died that same day.