Edith Roosevelt on Her Husband's Recovery from an Assassination Attempt and the Bullet Left Inside Him

Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt notes here that she is, indeed, married to a Bull Moose: of her husband, shot in the chest four months earlier while campaigning for president in 1912, she says,
 
My husband seems as well and strong as ever; the surgeons judged it wiser not to remove the bullet so I am always a little anxious.
 
Roosevelt was shot with a .38 caliber pistol on October 14, 1912, at close range, by a psychotic New York saloonkeeper against third terms. Roosevelt did not realize he was hit, however, until someone noticed a hole in his overcoat. When he reached inside his coat, he found blood on his fingers. The bullet, having traversed the manuscript of the speech he was to about to deliver, entered his chest wall but did not appear, at first, to be more than a scrape. So Roosevelt, for an hour and a half, gave the speech – “I have just been shot,” he said, “but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose” – and only afterward, collapsed. He spent eight days in hospital, and then on the 23rd of October, returned to campaigning. The bullet was never removed, and caused no difficulty after the wound healed.

Autograph Letter Signed, 3 pages, octavo, Sagamore Hill, Feb 3, no year [1913].