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MARCH 16, 2018
AIKEN-AUGUSTAʼS MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
If he were alive today... Our last three issues, published in the general vicinity of Black History Month and Presidents Day, featured articles related to each in our award-wanting series, “Who Is This?” (See page 4 in every issue, or issuu.com/medicalexaminer to read back issues you’ve missed.) The profi les of the doctors who treated George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in their final hours (one got an F, the other a B+) got us wondering about the fate of other presidents who also lost their last election, if you know what we mean. For instance, what about William Henry Harrison? Exactly 177 years ago this week, he was enjoying his first two weeks in the Oval Office, and about to begin his final two weeks in office. Yes, he was president for exactly 31 days, from March 4 through April 4, 1841. Put another way, three different men served as president of the United States within a period of 5 weeks. But we digress. Harrison had been characterized by his rivals during the presidential campaign as a backwoods rube, so on inauguration day he felt he had something to prove. On a wet and raw March day, he delivered the longest inaugural address in American history, going on for almost 2 hours wearing neither hat, overcoat, nor gloves. He rode to the ceremony on horseback rather than in a closed carriage, then rode through the cold, wet streets of Washington in the inaugural parade. It was little wonder after all that, then, that when he took sick, people thought he had come down with pneumonia. But he was fine from the inauguration until feeling ill on March 26, three weeks later. His doctors employed all the standard treatments of the day for pneumonia — castor oil, leeches, opium, and Virginia snakeweed, among others — all to no avail. An intensive review of notes written by Harrison’s physician, Thomas Miller, were used to analyze the case in a 2014 issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Jane McHugh and Philip A. Mackowiak wrote that, based on the treatment notes, typhoid fever was likely the correct diagnosis. Poor sanitation in the nation’s capital was the likely cause: the White House was downhill from a nearby spring which was its water source, and the spring in turn was downhill from a nearby field where the city deposited “night soil” each day. (“Night soil - noun: human excrement collected at night from buckets, outhouses, etc., and sometimes used as manure.”) If given the choice, Harrison would probably rather stick with the faulty diagnosis than the accurate one. The same cause — water contaminated by sewage — also claimed the lives of presidents James K. Polk and Zachary Taylor Another short-timer in the White House also ran afoul of the medical profession, but not because of inept care or malpractice; instead the cause was the limited knowledge of the day. James A. Garfield also took the oath of office on March 4, forty years to the day after Harrison’s inauguration. He died some 200 days later, 10 weeks after being shot at a train station Please see PRESIDENTS page 2
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