I was told in 8th grade history that Abe Lincoln developed bone cancer during the end of the Civil War. If he hadn’t been shot, he still wouldn’t have lived to see 1866, and Booth could have saved his time and his own life by waiting for him to die that way.
Mr. Rilch says, “How would anyone know? They didn’t even know what cancer was back then.”
I say, “They knew it when they saw it, they just couldn’t do anything about it.” But is it true?
Lincoln probably had Marfan syndrome, a genetic disease which makes people abnormally tall, and prone to physical deformities and heart disease, but I’ve never heard the Lincoln with cancer rumor.
Not sure if it is a sympton of Marfan’s, but I’ve heard that in some photos, one of Lincoln’s feet is unusually blurred, indicating tremors of some type. Anyone know?
Sir Rhosis
I believe Lincoln was 6’4". I’m 6’5" and I don’t consider myself “abnormally” tall. I remember my doctor saying that Marfan syndrome was usually reserved for the 6’10"+ crowd. Rilch, how would they have known bone cancer when they saw it?
There’s no way, short of exhuming Lincoln and doing an autopsy, to determine whether he had any life-threatening illnesses. (That was already done to poor old Zachary Taylor… all for nothing!)
Speculation on Lincoln’s health usually comes down to two things:
One of his former law partners told people, long after Lincoln’s death, that Lincoln had syphilis.
People make jusgments based on photographs. The Lincoln we see in photographs around 1865 looks so weathered, so frail, so OLD… not at all like the vigorous man who took office in 1861. Now, this might just reflect that Lincoln was getting old, it might just reflect the stress and strain that the war put on him… but some people are prepared to assume, based on those photos, that he was on death’s door already.
Not everyone with Marfan’s Syndrome is freakishly tall; many are merely on the tall side of average. And of course most tall people, even most amazingly tall people, don’t have Marfan’s. The speculation that Lincoln might have had it is based on his general appearance; tall and thin, of course, but also with elongated facial features and long hands and feet out of proportion to the rest of his body. However, it’s just speculation. It’s entirely possible to have all those features and not have Marfan’s.
As for cancer, yes, people have “known it when they saw it” for centuries. The name comes from the crab-like appearance of certain tumors. But how would they have seen bone cancer in the 1860s? Autopsies weren’t done in Lincoln’s day, and X-ray machines were decades in the future. He might have complained of pains, but that could have been from any number of causes including plain old stress and overwork.
Are you old enough to remember how Jimmy Carter aged in his four years in the White House? If you can find a picture of him from 1976 and another from 1980 or so, look at them side by side… it’s striking. Lincoln certainly wasn’t under any less pressure than Carter, so it’s no surprise he looked old and sick by the end of his life.
People with Marfan’s Syndrome often have a leaky heart valve (aortic regurgitation). This causes the heart to pump in a very “hyperdynamic” way. Conversely, the blood that’s pumped out tends to fall back into the heart (the regurgitation). The combined result is a bounding pulse that literally shakes the head, crossed legs, etc.
Hm. Okay, so bone cancer wouldn’t have been detectable, as opposed to some other forms of cancer; Marfan’s is a possibility, though not a certainty; and strain made him look ill even if he wasn’t. I’ll accept that.
Good point about Carter.
As far as I can tell the speculation that Lincoln suffered from Marfan’s Disease is based on the fact that he was tall and skinny and had big hands and feet (and we all know what that means). The histories also say that he was as physically tough as wang leather. Let me suggest that a childhood and youth of privation and hard physical labor may explain more about his physical appearance than any pseudo-medical speculation. While at 6’ 4" Lincoln was unusually tall there were plenty of tall men around. Even then the 6’ and 200# standard seems to have been the threshold for being a big man. Winfield Scott Hancock who commanded a corps in the Army of the Potomac (Hancock the superb) was 6’ 2" and his size was commented on frequently.
The eye witness reports more often comment on how gangly and sad Lincoln looked, rather than on his height. If we can believe half what we read about Mrs. Lincoln, Ol’ Abe had good reason to be sad, even without the burden of the Civil War.
I think there are some other reasons for this speculation.
Even for a man of his height, his fingers have been described as unusually long (a sign of Marfan Syndrome)
Contemporary reports describe him as being “loose jointed” (a Marfan feature)
The blurred legs in his photographs (see Sir Rhosis’ post above) have been taken to indicate the presence of aortic regurgitation (another sign of Marfan Syndrome - see my post above)
A number of web sites (eg. this one) talk about doing genetic testing for Marfan’s on some of Lincoln’s preserved tissues. I don’t know the current status of that endeavour.
I think there are some other reasons for this speculation.
Even for a man of his height, his fingers have been described as unusually long (a sign of Marfan Syndrome)
Contemporary reports describe him as being “loose jointed” (a Marfan feature)
The blurred legs in his photographs (see Sir Rhosis’ post above) have been taken to indicate the presence of aortic regurgitation (another sign of Marfan Syndrome - see my post above)
A number of web sites (eg. this one) talk about doing genetic testing for Marfan’s on some of Lincoln’s preserved tissues. I don’t know the current status of that endeavour.
I recently saw an article in the news (I work at a news station, although I don’t pay full attention…hey, that rhymes), Lincoln was apparently taking some type of medicine which contained fairly high levels of mercury. I think this may have been what your teacher was talking about. It wouldn’t lead to cancer, but it would lead to a degenerative brain problem which it is speculated would have killed him soon if he had not been assasinated.
Ohhhhhhhhhh.
Does anyone remember reading anything about a strange vision Lincoln told his wife about? I seem to remember him looking in a mirror in the middle of the night and seeing a phantom of himself (like his vision was failing and he saw only his outline … I don’t remember quite right). He told Mary that this meant he was going to die soon.
I also seem to remember the writer speculating that this meant Lincoln was on his last legs (the writer was quite certain he had Marfan’s), since hallucinations or vision problems are part of the conditions final stage. Anyway, I’m going to try to look it up, but I was wondering if anybody was familiar with this.
From the website linked in Karl Guass’s post
I don’t know about Abraham Lincoln having cancer, or Marfan Syndrome or anything else, but I do know that ever if John Wilkes Booth hadn’t shot him, Lincoln would be dead today. This speculation on what would have killed him if he had not been shot seems pointless - there are too many variables. He could have come down with a bad case of the flu and died the following year. He might have died in his sleep of heart failure aged 95. Then again, it’s possible that he may have been knocked down and killed by a runaway horse on his way home from the theatre. It’s all speculation without an answer. Ever if he had Marfan Syndrome, it may not have been the thing that killed him in the end - which, indeed, it wasn’t.
Pointless, perhaps. Irrelevant, again perhaps. But ineresting, fascinating, inriguing, etc., etc., etc. . . .
Thanks so much,
Sir Rhosis
Once I was dating a Black girl and we would stay up late into the night having long, intense discussions about reality. I said at one point, Don’t you think it’s eerie how Lincoln dreamed of his own death?
She wasn’t at all mystified by this. It was perfectly rational and obvious. “What’d you expect? I mean, he freed the slaves. Of course he knew he was gonna die. He freed the slaves!”
I just got back from a lecture where the professor said that the tests of Lincoln’s tissue for the genetic defect were positive. I didn’t stand up in class and ask him for a cite, but I went looking for confirmation on the web just now and couldn’t find any. Some of the sources, though, said that the trait is influenced by a lot of different genes, so it may not be that easy to test for it.