Health and Medical History of President

Warren Harding

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm... of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

In 1918, Harding "was still troubled by his health, physical and mental. He put on weight -- he was over two hundred pounds now -- and for all his golfing, his breath grew shorter. His heart trouble was real enough. 'I had a serious spell of it covering a period of two or three years,' he wrote.... 'As a matter of fact, I have never gotten wholly free of it'" 3g.

This must have been obivious to all, and it, along with his death in office, seems to have moderated what might have otherwise been much harsher criticism from those who did not like him, such as the notoriously sharp-tongued Alice Roosevelt Longworth 7a:

I think every one must feel that the brevity of his tenure of office was a mercy to him and to the country. Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob. He had discovered what was going on around him, and that knowledge, the worry, the thought of the disclosures and shame that were bound to come, undoubtedly undermined his health -- one might say actually killed him.

He was never in bed before midnight and more often it was one or two o'clock. He was always up at eight, and when it was suggested to him that he should lie abed in the morning he answered, "No, it is too much like a woman." Sometimes he would go to his office, lie down on the couch, and sleep.

After playing six holes of golf in Vancouver, Canada, Harding became so tired that, to quell any suspicions, he moved to the 17th hole, then finished the 18th. He later called for White House homeopath Sawyer, complaining of nausea and pain in the upper abdomen. Sawyer found the President had a pulse of 120 beats per minute and was breathing 40 times per minute. (Both of these readings are abnormally high.) "Intensive cardiac therapy including digitalis was started." 2

Harding died suddenly and unexpectedly in his bed in a San Francisco hotel room several days later, on August 2, 1923. Mrs. Harding refused permission for an autopsy. 2 Comment: It is often supposed that Harding died of an acute myocardial infarction, that is, a " heart attack" or "coronary occlusion." However, this should not be supposed merely because he died suddenly. Harding clearly had heart failure (recall the valet's statement), and persons with heart failure are prone to sudden death as well.

His physician diagnosed Harding's fatal myocardial infarct as crab meat poisoning 10a. Lyman Wilbur, who was a cardiologist and president of Stanford, forecast his death 1 MORE, as did renowned New York cardiologist Emmanuel Libman 6b.