Word: lincoln
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tissue that can cause heart and eye problems, affect skeletal growth and occasionally be fatal. A few months later, the boy's grandmother dropped in to inquire about his condition and revealed that her husband had died of Marfan's. The grandmother's married name was Lincoln...
Says Schwartz: "I call that my 'burning bush' moment. I had read Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln, which contains a great deal about Lincoln's physical characteristics." Suddenly everything connected. The Great Emancipator, Schwartz realized, was probably afflicted by Marfan's syndrome...
Since then, Schwartz, now 60, has traced the Lincoln Marfan gene back to 16th century England and now is more certain than ever about his theory. In the Western Journal of Medicine, he strongly suggests that had John Wilkes Booth not fired the fatal shot on April 14, 1865, Lincoln would have died within a year from complications of Marfan's syndrome-for which there is still no cure...
Schwartz points to the well-documented fact that Lincoln had disproportionately long arms, legs, hands and feet, even for a man of his height. While watching a regiment of Maine lumbermen during the Civil War, the President himself noted: "I don't believe that there is a man in that regiment with longer arms than mine." In 1907 a sculptor working with Lincoln casts observed that "the first phalanx of the middle finger is nearly half an inch longer than that of an ordinary hand." The President sometimes squinted with his left eye. All of these characteristics, according...
Schwartz has also presented an ingenious bit of evidence that Lincoln had a specific cardiovascular problem also associated with Marfan's syndrome: imperfect closure of the valves of the aorta, the large artery that carries blood from the heart. The clue appeared in a picture of the President taken in 1863. Lincoln had his legs crossed, and in an otherwise sharp photo, the left foot-suspended in the air -is blurred. When viewing the print. Lincoln asked why the foot was fuzzy. A friend familiar with physiology suggested that the throbbing arteries in the leg might have caused some...