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The Health of the Presidents

Rudolph Marx

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Jun 05, 2021 Werner rated it liked it

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Written by a medical doctor and American history buff (though he was German-born), Rudolph Marx, and published in 1960, this is a chronologically-arranged record of the lives of the United States' first 30 Presidents (through FDR) through a unique and quite interesting lens: their physical health, and its effects on their character, life stories, and official careers. (Why the author didn't carry the story on past 1945 isn't stated.) Those effects often weren't negligible by any means, and were Written by a medical doctor and American history buff (though he was German-born), Rudolph Marx, and published in 1960, this is a chronologically-arranged record of the lives of the United States' first 30 Presidents (through FDR) through a unique and quite interesting lens: their physical health, and its effects on their character, life stories, and official careers. (Why the author didn't carry the story on past 1945 isn't stated.) Those effects often weren't negligible by any means, and were often exacerbated (as he notes in the four-page Forward, and at various points in the text) by the relatively primitive state of medicine in much of this period. I read the book as a public library check-out back in my youth (1970 is a pretty fair guess –and yes, I do have a copy in front of me to supplement my memory!), and actually found it quite informative and fascinating. (Of course, I'm a history major. :-) )

Some of the episodes recounted here will be familiar to readers with a good knowledge of U.S. history. John Quincy Adams (the only President elected to the House after his Presidential term) suffered a massive stroke –his second-- at his desk during a session of the Congress, and died two days later in the Speaker's room. (He was 80 at the time.) The first President to die in office, the 68-year-old William Henry Harrison, caught a severe cold delivering the longest inaugural address in American history on a bitterly cold day without hat or coat; it got worse in the cold and drafty White House of that day (and by the time he called in medical help some three weeks later, it was diagnosed as pneumonia in one lung), and the doctors' attempts to treat it with emetics like ipecac dehydrated him and hastened his demise. (Medical science also didn't help President Garfield much after he was shot in the back by an assassin on July 2, 1881, although Dr. Marx defends his doctors on the grounds of their imperfect technology and misguided standards of practice; he lingered, mostly in misery, until Sept. 19, while his doctors completely misjudged the actual location of the bullet and probably caused the infection that led to blood poisoning with their repeated probings of the wound with unsanitary instruments.) It's well-known that Woodrow Wilson's serious stroke in Sept. 1919 made him unable to function for months, and even after that left him with severe mental impairment which “made rational cooperation with his staff and his Cabinet almost impossible” for the rest of his term. (This episode was a major impetus for the later passage of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, dealing with Presidential disability, though that was passed and ratified only in 1965-67, after this book was written.) And of course. Franklin Roosevelt's struggle to recover even partial use of his legs after his bout with polio in 1921, which left him unable to really walk or even stand without painful braces, is widely recognized as a critical factor in shaping the courage and iron determination so evident in his later career.

These, though, are only a few highlights; the reader of the book learns a lot about the health, and careers (since the author also fills in the contexts of their lives in general) of all of the Presidents covered. Dr. Marx writes with a clear, easily flowing style that's mostly reader friendly (if it has one fault, it's a tendency to use undefined medical terms in a number of places --though one can mostly get an idea of the meaning from the context, and since he's writing for a general audience, the author does take that into account with appropriate explanations at some points). The most severe weakness of the book is that it has no bibliography; and since it's a non-academic work for a lay readership, no sources are cited for any of the content. However, I believe it to be well-researched and accurate; on any point where I could check its accuracy from independent knowledge of the subject, it dovetails with what I know from other sources. I would recommend it to all readers interested in American history; and I'd say that any researcher who would write a companion volume carrying the narrative up to the present time would be doing a worthwhile work (if his/her finished product was of the same quality!) ...more

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