Health and Medical History of President

James Buchanan

A journalist of the time wrote "There was no head ache, no faltering steps, no flushed cheek" associated with Buchanan's drinking. "Oh no! All was as cool, as calm and as cautious and watchful as in the beginning. More than one ambitious tyro who sought to follow his... example gathered an early fall" 1b.

Buchanan would begin his drinking with cognac and end with old rye. Two or three bottles might be consumed at one sitting. The press commented on his resistance to alcohol's effects 3a. Comment: The gout, alas, was one effect of alcohol to which he was not resistant.

was a southern town, without the picturesqueness, but with the indolence, the disorder and the want of sanitation. ... Fish and oyster peddlers cried their wares and tooted their horns on the corners. Flocks of geese waddled on [Pennsylvania] Avenue, and hogs, of every size and color, roamed at large, making their muddy wallows on Capitol Hill. ... People emptied slops and refuse in the gutters, and threw dead domestic animals in the canal. Most of the population still depended on the questionable water supply afforded by the wells and by the springs in the hills behind the city. Privies, in the absence of adequate sewage disposal, were plentiful in yards and dirty alleys, and every day the carts of night soil trundled out to the commons ten blocks north of the White House. 5a

One theory ascribed the disease, which Bumgarner labels as dysentery (bloody diarrhea), to rats that had drowned in the hotel's cooking water, kept in attic reservoirs. Another theory held that frozen pipes had caused sewage to back up to food preparation areas 3b.

Buchanan was ill for several weeks. The question has been raised whether his judgment was impaired while he prepared his inaugural address 3b.

Buchanan was ill for several weeks. Many others got sick from the event, and one died 3b. Rumors in some extreme pro-Southern circles claimed this was a plot to poison the new leaders. In the end, however, most people accepted that sewer gas was the cause (recall that germ theory was not then well established). After closing briefly for repairs, the National Hotel re-opened, and regained its previous popularity 5b.