Health and Medical History of President
Ulysses GrantHealth and Medical History of President
Ulysses Grant
A modern biographer, Ron Chernow, concludes:
Alcohol was not a recreation selfishly indulged, but a forbidden impulse against which he struggled for most of his life. ... While drinking almost never interfered with his official duties, it haunted his career and trailed him everywhere, an infuriating, ever-present ghost he could not shake. It influenced how people perceived him and deserves close attention. As with so many problems in his life, Grant managed to attain mastery over alcohol in the long haul, a feat as impressive as any of his wartime victories. 2aChernow admits, however, that this is not the last word: "a thoroughgoing account is needed to settle the matter" 2a.
Like so many tobacco users, Grant gave up smoking when it was too late. Suffering chronic pain and diagnosed with an incurable oral cancer that was caused by tobacco, Grant was racing against his disease to finish writing his memoirs, so that his wife would not be destitute. Grant told friends on November 20, 1884:
Gentlemen, this is the last cigar I shall ever smoke. The doctors tell me that I will never live to finish the work on which my whole energy is centered these days... if I do not cease indulging in these fragrant weeds. It is hard to give up an old and cherished friend, that has been your comforter and solace through many weary nights and days. But my unfinished work must be completed, for the sake of those that are near and dear to me. 2b
He would die in nine months.
Yet, according to his adoring wife, he could lift 200-pound beams and could ride 50 miles in a day without breaking a sweat 2j.
It is also likely that Grant's illness contributed to his failures in life at that time 1a.
Comment:
As Bumgarner recognized
1f,
pleuritic plain after a protracted period in bed raises the possibility that
Grant developed a blood clot in one of his legs. (The bedsores alone indicate
the extent of his time in bed, and the "rheumatism" in his legs could have
been the pain of a deep vein thrombosis, i.e. blood clot.) If the blood clot
dislodged and traveled ("embolized") to his lungs, pleurisy could result.
There is a second possibility. Given that
Grant's cancer became symptomatic six months later, a blood clot in the lungs
could have been a side effect of the cancer, a combination known
as Trousseau syndrome. This can occur before a cancer becomes symptomatic.
However, Trousseau syndrome seems less likely because
there are no reports of later clots, which would be expected, and because
Grant's tumor was "epithelial" rather than a mucin-producing adenocarcinoma.
This episode altered Grant. He continued to be stoical and uncomplaining, but "he had grown very old-looking ... and his face looked as though some great sorrow had befallen him," according to an acquaintance. By February he was moving about the house on crutches, still bothered by leg pain. 2p
Even into July (1884) he remained weak and lame, using crutches 2q. At least through October he was still using crutches 2b.
After discovering a suspiciously swollen area on the back of the tongue, Barker referred Grant to Dr. John Douglas, a throat specialist. Douglas, too, found a hard, swollen area on the back of the tongue and, using a mirror, saw three lesions on the roof of the mouth. Grant asked, "Is it cancer?" Douglas replied, "General, the disease is serious, epithelial in character, and sometimes capable of being cured" ("epithelial" being a euphemism for "cancer" in that era). Douglas lessened the pain by topical application of cocaine and swabbed away tissue debris and mucus from the area, recommending that Grant return twice daily for repeat treatments. He did this, for a time riding a public streetcar to and from Douglas's office, no doubt startling his fellow passengers with his presence. 2s
In Chernow's unforgettable phrase, "Gradually Grant was ground down into a mass of pain" 2b. After a severe attack of neuralgia, his dentist extracted three teeth without anesthesia; this facilitated Douglas's cleanings, but did not lessen the pain 2b.
In November an eminent pathologist, Dr. George Shrady, reviewed some tissue Douglas took from Grant's tumor and was "perfectly sure" that it was "a lingual epithelioma -- cancer of the tongue." He forecast that Grant would endure agonizing pain and die within a year. Shrady told Grant himself that he suspected a connection between Grant's smoking and his cancer, and advised Grant to smoke at most one cigar a day. Grant lost his taste for tobacco soon after, and gave up smoking (see above). 2t
What followed was tragic and triumphant. Grant had recently been swindled and was broke. To provide for his soon-to-be widowed wife, he resolved to write his memoirs for publication, racing against the cancer. Despite suffering unrelenting pain and harboring a baseball-sized tumor in his neck, for four to six hours a day he would sit and write in an overstuffed chair, his legs up, a wool cap on his head, and a muffler around his neck. When he could not sleep, he wrote. 2u
He reluctantly took opiates to ease the pain, but that slowed his work. Because swallowing magnified the pain, he went without water and food for extended periods, to swallow less. His valet applied hot compresses to Grant's head and sprayed his throat with numbing "cocaine water." To spare his family, Grant maintained a stoic face... during the day. 2v
Despite all this, Grant's output was phenomenal, in both quantity and quality. Although a man of lifelong taciturnity, Grant could produce 10,000 words of superb, lean prose in a day (that's 40 double-spaced typewritten pages). All told, he wrote 336,000 words in one year. 2w
By May 1885, he was forced to dictate. His friend and publisher, Mark Twain, described Grant "never pausing, never hesitating for a word, never repeating" as he dictated 9000 words describing Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House -- in one sitting. The quality of Grant's writing astonished Twain. "There is no higher literature than these [memoirs]... Their style is flawless... no man can improve upon it." 2v
Grant died July 23, 1885 -- a week after finishing the manuscript. He weighed 90 pounds. He had already told a pastor, "I am ready to go. No Grant has ever feared death. I am not afraid to die." 2x
Twain thought the book had kept him alive for several months 2x. It was an explosive, record-setting best-seller, providing his wife the modern equivalent of $14 million 2y. Grant's memoirs are recognized today as the greatest presidential autobiography ever written -- and one of the greatest autobiographies written by anyone, anay time.
On the other hand, there is an anecdote that Abraham Lincoln, after being serenaded by a quartet of singers in 1860, said he wished he could sing like that, "but he knew only two tunes; one is 'Old One Hundred' and the other isn't'" 5a.
Interestingly, there are recent suggestions that the inability to perceive music can be a distinct neurological condition 6.
a p.105 b p.103 c p.109 d p.110 e p.107 f p.111
Comment: Devotes one chapter to each President, through Clinton. Written for the layperson, well-referenced, with areas of speculation clearly identified, Dr. Zebra depends heavily on this book. Dr. Bumgarner survived the Bataan Death March and has written an unforgettable book casting a physician's eye on that experience. |
a p.xxiii b p.931 c p.76 d p.80 e p.81 f p.83 g p.88 h p.93 i p.99 j p.96 k p.302 l pp.302-303 m pp.640-641 n p.641 o pp.xvii, 920 p p.920 q p.929 r pp.xviii-xix, 928-930 s pp.930-931 t p.931. Chernow has an error on pages 931-932 when he describes Julia Grant's 1876 praise of smoking as occurring after her husband's death. It was nine years *before* his death in 1885. u pp.xix, 931 v pp.xix-xx w p.xix x p.954 y p.953; conversion to 2023 dollars per: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1885?amount=450000 z p.78
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Comment: Credibility is dubious. Just before a list of Presidents, the article states: "Twenty of the 32 Presidents ... are proved or believed on a thick web of circumstance to have been nocturnal nuisances in the White House." |
a p.161 b p.157
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a p.68
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Comment: Reports the results Catherine L. Reed and colleagues: To not hear music: A case of congential amusia. Society for Neuroscience meeting. November 2-7, 2002. Orlando, Fla. |
Comment: Pendel was door-keeper at the White House from the time of Lincoln to the time of Theodore Roosevelt. Full text is available on-line at loc.gov. It is a rather dry book, and reads as if it were written by an old man. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?lhbcbbib:1:./temp/~~ammem_rEou:: |
a pp.236-238
Comment: Stoddard was editor and owner of the New York Evening Mail from 1900 to 1925. |
a p.323 b p.322
Comment: Maps -- in great detail -- the ancestors and descendants of American presidents through Ronald Reagan. They would have had an exhausting time with President Obama's family tree! MORE |