The Health of the First Ladies: Medical Histories from Martha Washington to Michelle Obama (42 page)

47.
Ibid., 51–2.

48.
Ibid., 11.

49.
Zall, 39–40; Gould, 23; Ketcham, 442–5; David B. Mattern and Holly C. Shulman, eds.,
The Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 49; Allgor, 113; Clark, 83: “I may hopefully leave this place in a fortnight.”

50.
Mattern, 149.

51.
Ibid., 86; Ketcham, 459–60; Tiffany Cole, e-mail.

52.
Allgor, 251.

53.
Ketcham, 481.

54.
Mattern, 103; Anthony, 208.

55.
Mattern, 141, 144, 169; Clark, 193.

56.
Mattern, 153; Robert Honyman, Virginia Center for Digital Research at the University of Virginia, http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/xslt/servlet/XSLTServlet?xml=/xml_docs/Dolley/Glossary.xml&xsl=/xml_docs/Dolley/glossary.xsl&area=glossaryr (accessed October 2011).

57.
Allgor, 357; Zall, 74.

58.
Clark, 242 (September 18, 1831), 277 (November 8, 1836).

59.
Ibid., 324.

60.
Zall, 101; Clark, 450.

1.
Woody Holton,
Abigail Adams
(New York: Free, 2009), 284.

2.
World Health Organization, “Malaria,” October 2011, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs094/en/index.html (accessed November 19, 2011); Randall M. Packard,
The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), xvi; “The World Malaria Report, 2010” (Malaria, WHO). Recent progress has significantly reduced the annual deaths from between 2 million and 3 million (Packard, xvi) to 850,000 (UN News Center) to 781,000 (WHO 2010). The annual case load has declined from 350 million to 500 million (Packard xvi) to 225 million (WHO 2010).

3.
Fiammetta Rocco,
The Miraculous Fever Tree
(Great Britain: HarperCollins, 2003), xviii, 253. Pages 170 and 173 describe malaria’s seasonality in America.

4.
Lynne Withey,
Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 208; Holton, 262.

5.
Holton, 277.

6.
Holton, 277: “seamy and unsanitary”; http://www.irishinnyc.freeservers.com/custom.html (accessed November 20, 2011): “Irish in New York City.”

7.
Withey, 212; Holton, 277.

8.
Withey, 214–5: description of Philadelphia trip in a much weakened state.

9.
David McCullough,
John Adams
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 513; Withey, 220–1; Holton, 217. Plasmodium vivax is the species of protozoan parasite that was endemic to the United States when Mrs. Adams was infected and was rarely fatal by itself. An African species, plasmodium falciparum, rarely present in North America, may frequently cause fatal disease.

10.
Withey, 217.

11.
Phyllis Lee Levin,
Abigail Adams
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 393: “Physical complaints from rheumatism and malaria increased to the point that she worried how she could manage the journey home when Congress adjourned”; Stewart Mitchell, ed.,
New Letters of Abigail Adams, 1788–190
1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 78: Abigail Adams, letter to sister, March 20, 1792, from Philadelphia.

12.
Mitchell, 66; Abigail Adams letter to sister, December 12, 1790, from Philadelphia: “a kind friend as well as physician”; McCullough, 433 (Autumn 1791): Dr. Rush’s visits; Paul C. Nagel,
The Adams Women: Abigail and Louisa Adams, Their Sisters and Daughters
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 85. In 1798 Abigail consulted Rush about her niece, her “holy trinity” of treatments; Levin, 448–9; Withey, 302, 306, Nabby.

13.
Deppisch, 11–12, 18, 21–2.

14.
M.L Duran-Reynals:
The Fever Bark Tree: The Pageant of Quinine
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1946), 38–40; Rocco, 52.

15.
Withey, 220–1.

16.
John Ferling,
John Adams
(New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 368–9; McCullough, 513; Withey, 258; Howard A. Kelly,
A Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography Comprising the Lives of Eminent
Deceased Physicians and Surgeons from 1610 to 1910
(New York: W.B. Saunders, 1920), 1164–5.

17.
Ferling, 368–9; Withey, 258; Nagel, 137: bilious fever reference.

18.
Levin (388–9) described her early arthritic symptoms; Levin, 192, and Holton, 196, described the 1784 trans–Atlantic journey.

19.
McCullough, 433.

20.
Levin, 293.

21.
Mitchell, 78.

22.
Ibid., 131. Letter from AA in Philadelphia to sister, February 6, 1798.

23.
Levin, 388–9.

24.
Levin, 423. In March 1807, AA had barely recovered from a rheumatic attack; Holton, 407. In the 1815–6 winter, she suffered through her usual cold weather ailments, especially rheumatism.

25.
Holton, 109–114; Withey, 83–4.

26.
Holton, 21.

27.
Jennifer Carrell,
The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox
(New York: Plume/Penguin, 2004), 392–3.

28.
Holton, 282, 284, 307; Ellis, 163; Levin, 294; Withey, 217, 220; Joseph J. Ellis,
First Family: Abigail and John Adams
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 163.

29.
Levin, 305.

30.
Holton, 307.

31.
McCullough, 447.

32.
Holton, 307–9.

33.
Holton, 311, 315.

34.
Ferling, 368–9; Holton, 322; Levin, 356, McCullough, 526; Nagel, 12.

35.
McCullough, 530–2; Holton, 328.

36.
Levin, 388–9.

37.
Ellis, 194.

38.
Holton
,
324–6; Withey, 261.

39.
Robert P. Watson,
The Presidents’ Wives: Reassessing the Office of the First Lady
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 138.

40.
Walter R. Borneman,
Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America
(New York: Random House, 2008), 13.

41.
John Reed Bumgarner,
Sarah Childress Polk: A Biography of a Remarkable First Lady
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 15, 26.

42.
Barbara Bennett Peterson,
Sarah Childress Polk: First Lady of Tennessee and Washington
(New York: Nova History, 2002), 5–8, 19.

43.
Borneman, 7–8.

44.
Bumgarner, 34; Jimmie Lou Sparkman Claxton,
Eighty-Eight Years with Sarah Polk
(New York: Vantage, 1972), 36.

45.
Bumgarner, 94.

46.
Milo Milton Quaife,
The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency
(Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1910; Claxton, 87–8.

47.
Quaife; Bumgarner, 92–4; Borneman, 282.

48.
Deppisch, 20–23, 30.

49.
Ibid., 20–31.

50.
Quaife, May 4; Claxton, 95–6.

51.
Bill Severn,
Frontier President: The Life of James K. Polk
(New York: Ives Washburn, 1965), 67–117.

52.
Bumgarner, 150–1.

53.
John Shaw,
Lucretia
(New York: Nova History, 2004), 89.

54.
Ibid., 71.

55.
Ibid., 100–102; Harry James Brown and Frederick D. Williams, eds.,
The Diary of James A. Garfield, 1878–1881
, vol. 4 (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1981 [May 4, 1881]).

56.
Allan Peskin,
Garfield
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1978), 573.

57.
Deppisch, 48, lists Lucretia Garfield’s physicians; 18 quotes Thomas Jefferson’s observation.

58.
Ludwig M. Deppisch, “Homeopathic Medicine and Presidential Health,”
PHAROS
60, no. 4 (Fall 1997), 5–10; James C. Clark,
The Murder of James A. Garfield: The President’s Last Days and the Trial and Execution of His Assassin
(Jefferson NC: McFarland, 1993), 42–3; Peskin, 573; Shaw, 100–102.

59.
Shaw, 100–102.

60.
Clark, 51–115; Shaw, 100–102.

61.
Shaw, 100–102
.

62.
Clark, 42.

63.
Peskin, 573.

64.
Candice Millard,
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
(New York: Doubleday, 2011), 112.

65.
John Duffy, “The Impact of Malaria on the South,” in
Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South,
ed. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 29–54; Margaret Humphreys,
Malaria, Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 40.

66.
Ibid.

67.
Randall M. Packard,
The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 7.

68.
History of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia
(Washington, D.C.: Medical Society of the District of Columbia, 1909), 143.

69.
New York Times
, July 16, 1879.

70.
Shaw, 119.

71.
Rocco, 170–2.

72.
Deppisch, 23.

73.
Peskin, 13.

74.
Deppisch, 24.

75.
John G. Sotos,
The Physical Lincoln Sourcebook: An Annotated Medical History of Abraham Lincoln and His Family
(Mount Vernon, VA: Mount Vernon Book Systems, 2008), 146.

76.
Deppisch, 127.

77.
William S. McFeely,
Grant: A Biography
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 63.

78.
Edmund Morris,
Colonel Roosevelt
(New York: Random House, 2010), 16.

1.
Lewis L. Gould,
American First Ladies: Their Lives and Legacy
, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 67.

2.
The number of children that resulted from the John/Letitia mating remains uncertain. Craig Hart,
A Genealogy of the Wives of American Presidents and Their First Two Generations of Descent
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 228–9, lists eight children. Christopher Leahy, “Torn Between Family and Politics: John Tyler’s Struggle for Balance,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
114, no. 3 (2006), 322–355), and Lewis L. Gould,
American First Ladies: Their Lives and Legacy
, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001, 66) counted nine pregnancies. All agree that seven Tyler children attained adulthood.

3.
William Degregorio,
The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents
(New York: Wings, 1993), 153–4.

4.
Leahy, 330.

5.
Gould, 67: “presided over the governor’s mansion with charm”;
Washington Globe
, September 12, 1842: “then in perfect health and adorned with beauty.”

6.
Leahy, 331, 345.

7.
Ibid., 345–6.

8.
Lyon G. Tyler,
The Letters and Times of the Tylers
, vol. 1 (Richmond, VA: Whittet & Shepperson, 1884), 562, Letter from John Tyler to Mary Tyler, June 16, 1832.

9.
Laura C. Holloway,
The Ladies of the White House, or, In the Home of the Presidents; Being a Complete History of the Social and Domestic Lives of the Presidents from Washington to the Present Time, 1789–1881
(Philadelphia: Bradley, 1881), 375; this part of Virginia seceded in 1863 to become the state of West Virginia.

10.
Robert Byrd, “The Greenbrier,” Congressional Record, 106th Congress (1999–2000), July 10, 2000, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r106:S10JY0–0008 (accessed October 19, 2013).

11.
Washington Globe
, obituary (September 13, 1842);
Baltimore Sun
, obituary (September 14, 1842); Holloway, 387; Gould, 67; Carl Sferrazza Anthony,
First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power, 1789–1961
, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: William Morrow, 1990) on 127 states: “Although Mrs. Tyler’s stroke evidently took her powers of speech in its first stage, she regained it”; The
Baltimore Sun
(above) suggests otherwise: “The loss of speech, to an extent, was one of the unhappy effects of the attack”; The description of Letitia’s silent joy over her son’s marriage is from Elizabeth Tyler Coleman,
Priscilla Cooper Tyler and the American Scene, 1816–1889
(Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1955), 69.

12.
Leahy, 329.

13.
Coleman, 73; Chitwood, Oliver Perry:
John Tyler: Champion of the Old South
(New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 199; Gould, 68: remained in her bedroom.

14.
Sally G. McMillen,
Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth and Infant Rearing
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 180, 91.

15.
Vivek Dhawan, et al.: “Long-Term Effects of Repeated Pregnancies (Multiparity) on Blood Pressure Regulation.”
Cardiovascular Research
64 (2004), 179–186.

16.
Gould, 68.

17.
Gould, 68; Anthony, 122; Coleman, 83; Robert II Seager,
And Tyler Too: A Biography of John and Julia Gardiner Tyler
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 172–3.

18.
Coleman, 86–7.

19.
Ibid., 87–8.

20.
Ibid., 89.

21.
Hart, 224–5.

22.
Coleman, 99; Dan Monroe,
The Republican Vision of John Tyler
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 136.

23.
Holloway, 385–6.

24.
Washington Intelligencer
, September 12–13, 1842;
Washington Globe
, September 12, 1842; Holloway, 395.

25.
Edward Crapol,
John Tyler: The Accidental President
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 268: a comprehensive review of Tyler’s difficult presidency.