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Health and Medical History of President Theodore RooseveltPresident #26: 1901-1909
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"Death had to take him sleeping. For if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been
a fight."
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This style... | ... means the event occurred while President. |
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![]() asthma |
Discussed at great length in 2a.
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![]() myopia |
"without his glasses his vision was so bad that he couldn't recognize his own sons"
1b.
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![]() ![]() polo unconsciousness |
A few episodes of unconsciousness as a result of playing polo.
3a.
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![]() bleeding tendency |
Owen Wister describes the distracted Roosevelt, writing his book on the naval war of 1812,
being urgently prodded to get dressed by Mrs. Roosevelt's cry,
"We're dining out in twenty minutes, and Teddy's drawing little ships!" ...
at which point "there would be a scurry, and he would cut himself shaving, and it
wouldn't stop bleeding, and they would have to surround him and take measures to save
his collar from getting stained"
4a.
Comment:
This would seem to suggest at tendency to bleeding, but of course one must know how deep
the cut was.
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![]() ![]() tiring campaign |
Roosevelt ran for President in 1912, as a third-party candidate. There were suspicions
that the strain of the campaign was proving too much for Roosevelt. His voice was bothering him seriously. Reports reached the Bull Moose headquarters that he was losing his grip, that he was repeating himself disastrously. He was forced to cancel two addresses scheduled for the Middle West because of his throat. The disability was bad enough to raise the possibility that he could speak no more. 5aRoosevelt did not like to speak in the open air, for it put too much of a strain on his voice. 6a |
![]() shot at |
During a stop in Milwaukee on his 1912 "Bull Moose" campaign for the presidency,
Roosevelt was shot at close range by John Schrank, a psychotic New York saloonkeeper. Schrank
had his .38 caliber pistol aimed at Roosevelt's head, but a bystander saw the gun and deflected
Schrank's arm just as the trigger was pulled. Roosevelt did not realize he was hit until someone
noticed a hole in his overcoat. When Roosevelt reached inside his coat, he found blood on his
fingers.
Roosevelt was extremely lucky. He had the manuscript of a long, 50-page speech in his coat
pocket, folded in two, and the bullet was no doubt slowed as it passed through it. He also
had a steel spectacle case in his pocket, and the bullet traversed this, too, before entering
Roosevelt's chest near the right nipple. Thus, one could say that Roosevelt's long-windedness
and myopia saved his life!
MORE
Although the bullet traveled superiorly and medially for about 3 inches after breaking the
skin, it lodged in the chest wall, without entering the pleural space. Roosevelt was examined
in a Milwaukee hospital
MORE,
(where he reluctantly allowed the surgeons to administer an injection of tetanus anti-toxin
1c),
and then was observed for 8 days in a Chicago hospital. He was discharged on October 23, 1912
-- only a few days before the election. The bullet had effectively stopped Roosevelt's campaign.
He finished second to
Woodrow Wilson,
but ahead of the incumbent President,
William Howard Taft.
The bullet was never removed, and caused no difficulty after the wound healed.
7
The details of the assassination attempt and its aftermath are described in
6b.
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![]() snored |
Roosevelt reporetdly snored so loudly in a hospital that complaints were filed by almost every
patient in the wing where he was recuperating
8.
Comment:
I have no hard evidence to support the reasonable supposition that this incident occurred during
his recovery from the assassination attempt in 1912. Given Roosevelt's obesity in later life,
snoring would not be surprising.
Loud snoring raises the possibility of sleep apnea. Hypersomnolence would be an additional
sign of sleep apnea. Was Roosevelt hypersomnolent? During his Presidency, at least, he was
not. The White House usher observed
9a:
President Roosevelt slept well at night, but never in the day. He liked to read in the evening after all was quiet. The usual retiring hour was about ten-thirty, but it was always with difficulty that the President was persuaded to turn in at that time. He would promise to come along in a minute, but would immediately become absorbed in a book or magazine and it was generally after much effort and much persuasion that he would finally turn in for the night. Mrs. Roosevelt would call and call. The sound of her voice calling "The-o-dore!" is well remembered by all the older employees. She often appealed to me to go to the President and "see if you cannot persuade him to come to bed." No matter how late he sat up, he always arose at the same time in the morning and always appeared refreshed and hearty.Nor did Roosevelt show signs of excessive daytime somnolence on the campaign trail in 1912. While stumping in Milwaukee, one of Roosevelt's intimates wrote: "We had a few minutes before dinner, and the Colonel took a little nap sitting in a rocking-chair in his room. It was the only time, in all the campaign trips I made with him, that I ever saw him sleep before bedtime." 6c |
![]() obese? |
In 1912, Roosevelt's campaign manager wrote: "We usually had our meals together in the
dining-car. He was an eager and valiant trencherman, and I saw how it was that he had more
than two inches of flesh and fat over his ribs for the lunatic's bullet to go through. He drank
great quantities of milk, but not much of anything else. I have seen him eat a whole chicken
and drink four large glasses of milk at one meal, and chicken and milk were by no means the
only things served"
6d.
By April 1915, ex-President
Taft
noticed that Roosevelt did not "have as good color as he used to have," that his
face seemed "fatter and flabbier," that he looked "a bit coarser"
1d.
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![]() ![]() blind in one eye |
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![]() ![]() ![]() otitis media & thigh abscess |
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![]() deaf in left ear |
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![]() ![]() trouble sleeping |
Even as President, Roosevelt had no trouble sleeping. But during World War I, all four of Roosevelt's
sons were in the Army in Europe
1f.
TR now admitted "I wake up in the middle of the night, wondering if the boys are all right,
and thinking how I could tell their mother if anything happened"
1g.
The youngest son, Quentin, a pilot, was killed in action in July 1918.
1g.
TR's eldest son, Theodore, was awarded the Medal of Honor in World War II for his actions on
Normandy Beach on D-Day.
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![]() chief characteristics |
"His chief characteristics were vision, courage, decision, instant readiness for action,
the simplest honesty and the most wholesome sanity. His mental engine ran at a higher speed
than that of any other man I have ever known. His foresight was uncanny. His sympathy was so
quick, his emotion so intensely human, that he penetrated the feelings of others often as if
by magic."
6e
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![]() ? infection |
"An infection picked up in South America still poisoned his blood. He was, in that summer
of 1918, close to the end of his stormy trail."
5b
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![]() ![]() died in his sleep |
The January 1919 New York Times obituary gives many details
12.
Had Roosevelt not died at the young age of 60, it is quite likely that he would have been
elected President in 1920. At the very least, "He would not need to lift a finger this
time [as opposed to 1912], and the [Republican presidential] nomination would still be his"
13a.
Interestingly, Harding might have been Roosevelt's Vice President [Ibid.]. If Roosevelt
had lived, say, three years longer, and Harding still had died in 1923, then the Secretary
of State would have succeeded to the Presidency under the law then in effect.
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The Missouri Governor [Herbert S. Hadley] was not in rugged health at that time, and in the talk with Colonel Roosevelt he mentioned the possibility that the presidency, if he should be nominated and elected, might kill him. The Colonel replied that in his judgment it was worth the sacrifice; that the presidency of the United States was the greatest task that could be laid upon any man, and that to fulfill it worthily was paramount to every consideration of personal welfare. 6f
I have always made it a practice on such trips to take a bottle of morphine with me. Because one never knows what is going to happen, and I did not mean to be caught by some accident where I should have to die a lingering death. I always meant that, if at any time death became inevitable, I would have it over with at once, without going though a long-drawn-out agony from which death was the only relief. 6g
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a pp.310. Marshall was Wilson's Vice-President and is best known for his remark: "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar." b p.8 c p.286 d p.295 e p.303 f p.300 g p.306
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a pp.36, 44, 59, 63, 70, 79, 81-82, 89, 90-108, 110-113, 133, 189, 190, 212, 229, 249, 340, 367
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a p.201
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a pp.xvii-xviii
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a p.836 b p.912
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a pp.216, 356, 367 b pp.374-393, 398 c p.373 d p.429 e p.458 f p.303 g p.434
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![]() | Comment: Cited by: Fairbanks DNF. Snoring: an overview with historical perspectives. Pages 1-16 in: Snoring and Obstructive Sleep Apnea. 2nd ed. Fairbanks, David N. F. and Fujita, Shiro (eds.). NY: Raven Press, 1994. |
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a p.270
Comment: The Library of Congress contains more of Hoover's first-hand recollections of eight presidents.
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a p.52
Comment: Ira Smith was a peppery fellow who ran the White House mail room from 1897 to 1948. He started working during the administration of William McKinley and was the only mail room staffer until the volume of mail made it necessary to hire help during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.
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a p.308
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a p.311
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a p.72 b p.16
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a p.184 b pp.411, 495
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
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