Incompetency, massive infections, and… death by cherries?! Becoming
President of The United States might be hazardous to your health!
Human beings have always been curious about how the body works, and evidence suggests
that the very first autopsy was performed by a Greek physician, Galen of Pergamum.
Unfortunately, not everyone approved of performing research on the dead,
and the science of forensic medicine faced many challenges. By the early 1800s,
however, the use of autopsy had become more widely accepted,
but even so, it still took many years for medical examiners to become really good at their jobs.
Often, especially in the early days, an autopsy report didn't always tell the complete story. This
was especially troubling when it came to the death of someone as important as an American president.
Zachary Taylor was the 12th President of the United States, from 1849-1850,
and holds the dubious distinction of serving one of the shortest presidential
terms in American history. The story goes that Taylor was only in office
for 16 months when he fell gravely ill after eating a bowl of cherries and milk.
He went to bed suffering from stomach pain, vomiting,
and diarrhea and was sick for four days with severe gastroenteritis. When he died,
his physicians declared he'd succumbed to a case of cholera.
Not everyone was convinced, however, and rumors that the president had been poisoned by dissenting
Southern politicians persisted into the 1990s. Finally, in order to put an end to the nasty
rumors, the president's body was exhumed in 1991 when it underwent a full, 20th-century autopsy.
To the dismay of everyone who loves a good conspiracy,
the medical examiner concluded Taylor had not been poisoned even though non-lethal
traces of arsenic were found. The autopsy report stated the president had died of one of, quote:
Perhaps the real tragedy of Taylor's death is what the autopsy report says about the state of
medicine during the president's lifetime. Today, acute gastroenteritis is viewed as
little more than a very bad stomach ache. It is easily curable and rarely causes death.
Abraham Lincoln was the first American president to be assassinated and the
first to undergo a well-publicized autopsy even though it was painfully
obvious what had killed him. The evening before, an actor named John Wilkes Booth
walked into the presidential box at Ford's Theater in Washington D.C.
and fired a single bullet from a Derringer at point-blank range into Lincoln's head.
"I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologizing old mantrap."
Obviously, there wasn't a huge need for an autopsy to discover how President Lincoln died but,
because no one could stomach the idea of leaving the fatal bullet
in the President's skull, an autopsy was ordered.
According to the report, the ball entered Lincoln's head at the back of the skull
about one inch left of the centerline. It then passed through the left posterior of
the cerebrum and continued on until it lodged in the white matter of the brain.
Perhaps most disturbingly of all, the doctor who performed the autopsy couldn't
even find the bullet until he removed Lincoln's brain and it fell into a basin.
The assassination of President James A. Garfield,
happened just 16 years after Lincoln, and like Lincoln, Garfield was not acting in
his official capacity as president when he was shot. Garfield was actually on vacation
when he was shot at a train station by a disappointed office seeker, Charles Guiteau.
According to reports, the first bullet grazed the president's arm
and the second one struck him in the back, but unlike Lincoln, Garfield's wounds were
survivable. Unfortunately, germ theory was not as accepted then as it is today.
The good Samaritans trying to help the president in the minutes after
his injury probably did more harm than good with
their unwashed hands and their unsanitized instruments they used to probe his wound.
"Ready?"
The president lingered on for more than two months as doctors tried,
unsuccessfully, to retrieve the bullet in his back. Weeks dragged on as Garfield developed
a persistent fever and abscesses all over his body before he died.
It was not until after his death that Garfield's doctors were finally able to locate the bullet,
which had broken the president's 11th rib, en route to his spinal column, where it fractured
his first lumbar vertebra, before finally coming to rest just below his pancreas.
According to the autopsy report, the track the bullet left in Garfield's
body was completely infected. Bone fragments had pierced Garfield's "adjacent soft parts"
and the bullet had become encyste, leaving a 6"x 4" abscess between his liver and colon.
The autopsy further revealed the bullet had ruptured an artery,
and Garfield's abdominal cavity was filled with nearly a pint of blood. By the time
Garfield finally passed away, he had also developed bronchopneumonia in both lungs.
It's clear to us today that Garfield died from a massive infection caused by the unsanitary
conditions in which he was treated. If his injury had occurred during the 21st century,
doctors would have performed surgery right away.
What's more important, however,
is that the surgery would have been performed in sterile conditions if done
today. Even Garfield's assassin understood what had eventually killed the president,
declaring at his trial that the doctors should share with him the blame for Garfield's death.
"I want these newspapers and the doctors who actually killed
the president to share with me the odium of his death."
William McKinley, the 25th President of the United States, was fatally shot
on September 6, 1901, while attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo,
New York. McKinley was the third president to be assassinated while still in office.
Shot twice in the abdomen at point-blank range by self-described anarchist Leon Czolgosz, Mckinley
was the first president to be assassinated in the 20th century. Unfortunately for him, however, his
doctors understood little more about how to treat a gunshot wound than back in Garfield's time.
McKinley's medical team was headed by a gynecological surgeon, Dr. Matthew D. Mann,
who, while not an ideal choice for bullet removal,
was assumed to understand at least the basics of surgical procedure.
But when, as in Garfield's case, the surgeon was unable to locate the bullet, he did not
continue trying to retrieve it. Instead, he merely cleaned the wound and closed it back
up. What is interesting to note is McKinley's doctors actually had an early version of an
X-ray machine available to them to help find the bullet, but they apparently never used it.
Instead, they told everyone the president was doing just fine and even on the mend,
until he took a sudden turn for the worse and died on September 14, 1901.
At the autopsy, the president's doctors were surprised to discover that in spite
of having "cleaned" the wound, the path of the bullet was riddled with gangrene.
It appeared that the president had died from a massive systemic
infection that killed him in the most unpleasant of ways.
Decades after the death of John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States,
people are still arguing about who killed him and why,
but the actual mechanism of his death isn't under dispute. He was killed by a bullet.
"From Dallas Texas…The flash…Apparently
official... President Kennedy died at 1 PM Central Standard Time."
Unlike Garfield and McKinley, who died as a result of ignorance and incompetence, JFK had the benefit
of 20th-century medicine, which had progressed a great deal by the time he met his end on a bright,
November afternoon in Dallas. If the exact circumstances of his death are still debated,
what is certain is that JFK was attended by doctors who were very good at their jobs.
According to Kennedy's autopsy report, there were
two major wounds noted on the president's body. The first was a severe head wound,
and the other was a bullet wound to the throat that had been enlarged into a tracheostomy
by a doctor who had attended Kennedy just after the shooting.
To conspiracy theorists, this is a tragic detail not because of the doomed effort to
save the life of the president, but because the tracheostomy obscured the wound, thus making it
impossible to know from which direction the bullet had been fired. In any case,
all conspiracies aside, it was not the bullet that tore into JFK's throat that took his life.
According to the autopsy report, the bullet that caused the massive wound
in the president's head entered Kennedy's skull and fragmented, killing him instantly. A portion
of it then bounced along through the cranial cavity leaving little bits of metal behind.
Another portion of the bullet exited through the parietal bone,
which is the large part of the skull on the upper back side of the head,
"carrying with it portions of cerebrum, skull, and scalp." The report officially concludes:
"It is our opinion that the wound of the skull produced such extensive damage to
the brain as to preclude the possibility of the deceased surviving this injury."
When asked if President Kennedy could have survived his injuries if he had
suffered them in the 21st century rather than 1963, doctors have expressed the
opinion that the treatment Kennedy would have received in the 1960s would not have
been significantly different from the care he would have been given today.
The throat injury might have been fixable, but even cutting-edge modern medicine couldn't have
increased JFK's chances of surviving the gunshot wound that tore his skull apart.
Herbert Hoover, was the 31st President of the United States, serving only one term from 1929
to 1933. He is probably best known for getting all the blame for the Great Depression, though it is
arguable whether he really walked into the White House at the worst possible time for the economy.
After his 1932 defeat by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hoover faded into
the background of politics until his health finally started to decline in the early 1960s.
Hoover remained in reasonably good health until 1962 when he was diagnosed with colon cancer.
His health declined throughout the following year, and in October 1964, he died. Although
colon cancer may have played some role in his death, that's not what the autopsy found.
The autopsy report stated that he died due to a rare vascular condition known today as Dieulafoy's
lesion, an abnormally large artery in the GI tract that causes severe intestinal bleeding.
It's possible that prompt treatment could have saved him, but Hoover was 90 years old at the time
and had repeatedly refused to be hospitalized, so it's doubtful much could have been done.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961,
but his battle with high blood pressure began in 1930 when he was just a 40-year-old Army
officer. His heart issues escalated in 1955 when he suffered a massive heart attack,
and later in life, intermittent blood pressure spikes led to four more heart attacks.
Sources present at a cabinet meeting in November of 1957 during Eisenhower's second
term as President reported a strange episode that occurred in the middle of the meeting.
The President suddenly lost motor function, losing his ability to grasp a pen or even
to hold onto papers. The shocked observers described him as speaking "gibberish." Later,
the White House was to downplay the incident, calling it a temporary "abnormality" of
the brain. In any case, Eisenhower was back to work three days later.
Eisenhower died of congestive heart failure at Walter Reed Hospital in March of 1969. An
autopsy performed soon after the president's death discovered a tumor on his adrenal gland.
Apparently, the tumor caused a constant release of adrenaline into Eisenhower's system which would
have put him more at risk for such conditions as high blood pressure, heart attack, and stroke.
Unfortunately, while he was alive, no one ever suspected Eisenhower might have had a tumor,
so a diagnosis that could have helped correct his affliction wasn't made until after his death.
The 36th President of the United States, Lydon B. Johnson, had a reputation for being one of the
hardest-working presidents ever. The problem was, to Johnson, the idea of "hard work" meant 20-hour
work days sitting at a desk with no time at all for exercise. In addition, he was a chain smoker
with an alcohol problem who loved hamburgers with french fries and despised vegetables.
There is little doubt Johnson's disregard for his health contributed to his first heart
attack at the age of 47. There’s good reason to believe he suffered a second in the hall of the
Parkland Memorial Hospital emergency room while he awaited news of JFK's fate in November of 1963.
Johnson was only to serve a single term as president but his time in office left its mark.
At age 63 he complained of "chest pain" which doctors diagnosed as angina and sent
him home with instructions to "lose weight." It turned out to be only a temporary reprieve,
however, because the next year Johnson experienced a massive heart attack.
From that point on, his health deteriorated, until January 22, 1973, at the age of 65,
he suffered a fifth, and fatal, heart attack. Johnson's autopsy report came as no surprise. At
the time of his death, two of his main coronary arteries were completely blocked, and the third
was 80% blocked. In spite of all his doctor's warnings to quit smoking, cut out junk food,
and exercise Johnson stubbornly refused to take their advice and in the end, he paid the price.