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If you know anything about William Henry Harrison, it’s probably that he was the shortest-serving
U.S. President of all time.
He lasted just 32 days before getting sick and dying in April of 1841.
The story goes that Harrison gave an extremely long inaugural address -- something like two
hours long -- outside, in the cold and wet, without a coat or gloves.
That gave him a nasty bout of pneumonia, which he didn’t survive.
But a modern look at the case suggests that Harrison wasn’t killed by a foolish mix
of verbosity and a failure to bundle up, but by contaminated water in the White House.
And it probably took down a second president, too.
This new interpretation of Harrison’s death comes from a paper published in the journal
Clinical Infectious Diseases in 2014.
The authors re-examined the case summary left behind by the ninth President’s doctor,
Thomas Miller.
The first clue that pneumonia might not be the right cause of death, especially if it
resulted from Harrison’s lengthy speech, is the timing.
Harrison fell ill some three weeks after the address -- which is way longer than you would
think if the two were related.
Other reports at the time also suggest that the weather wasn’t even all that cold.
The second red flag is that Dr. Miller was called to the White House not because Harrison
was having difficulty breathing, but because he was feeling anxious and tired, symptoms
the President thought were from the stress of his campaign and the first few weeks in
office.
He also explained that he had a history of dyspepsia, or indigestion, that had recently
flared up.
Over the next few days, the President’s primary complaints were a chill and constipation
-- which, again, doesn’t really sound like pneumonia.
In fact, the constipation got so bad it’s what doctors today would call obstipation,
or really, really severe constipation.
Harrison’s side hurt, probably from his very full bowel, and he was also nauseated.
Miller did what he could, at least for a 19th century physician, which was to prescribe
laxatives, perform enemas, and give laudanum, a form of opium, for the pain.
He also gave quite a bit of quicksilver, or mercury, which of course is toxic, so that
wasn’t exactly helping.
It was only on day five that Harrison started having trouble breathing and coughing up blood.
On day six, Harrison finally pooped, in the form of smelly, watery diarrhea.
And eventually, after a few more days, his pulse slowed, his fingertips were blue, and
he died, early in the morning on April 4th.
The most interesting thing about Miller’s diagnosis of pneumonia is that he didn’t
actually seem super sure of it himself.
He wrote that the disease wasn’t considered a case of pure pneumonia, instead the diagnosis
“afforded a succinct and intelligible answer to the innumerable questions as to the nature
of the attack.”
That’s 1800s-speak for ‘The diagnosis is funky, but the American people need to
be told something about how their President died.’
It’s also telling that Miller didn’t treat Harrison with the then-standard of care for
pneumonia, which was bleeding.
There, Harrison actually kind of lucked out, since that would have probably killed him
faster.
So, if not pneumonia, what killed the President?
Well, the paper’s authors argue that the symptoms better match enteric fever, which
is an umbrella term for typhoid and paratyphoid fevers.
Typhoid and paratyphoid are essentially the same disease — they’re just caused by
different strains of Salmonella bacteria, and paratyphoid is usually less severe.
In both cases, there’s a fever, and a bunch of non-specific symptoms, like abdominal pain,
body aches, headache, fatigue and constipation.
The bacteria attack the lining of the gut, which can then break open, and pneumonia is
actually a common secondary infection.
This new analysis suggests that this is probably what happened.
Miller may have even made the broken bowel more likely by giving the President enemas.
Harrison then likely died of the resulting blood infection, or sepsis.
As for how Harrison contracted enteric fever, well, the bacteria are usually spread in water
or food that’s contaminated with the feces of someone who’s infected.
And back in the 1840s, the White House was getting its water from a spring just 7 blocks
away from a dumping ground for human waste.
At the time, Washington D.C. didn’t have a sewage system.
Instead, people collected their pee and poop in buckets, and at night workers known as
‘night soil’ men picked it up and deposited it in a field.
So it’s not hard to imagine Salmonella bacteria periodically making its way to the spring
and spreading the disease.
In fact, several other Presidents of the era, including James Polk and Zachary Taylor, developed
gastrointestinal diseases similar to Harrison’s that were probably also enteric fever.
Taylor died in 1850, just over a year into the job.
Polk survived, but was sickly from it, and likely died from cholera just after leaving
the White House.
In following years, Washington and other major U-S cities put in sewer systems to deal with
human waste in a sanitary way.
But for a while, the White House was one of the most dangerous and deadly places in D.C.
Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow!
If you’d like to learn even more about science and history — and presidents — you can
watch one of my favorite episodes of SciShow of all time, our episode on how 18th-century
medicine killed George Washington.
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