The Physical Lincoln

[ELCore]

(07-09-2012 08:26 AM)Ed Steers Wrote:  Dr. Soto's diagnosis concluding that Lincoln had the rare disease we refer to today as MEN2B is based primarily on "lip lumps" (See Soto, Chapter 14).

I do not think it's fair to say that the diagnosis is "based primarily" on lip lumps.

True, Sotos says, "Lincoln's lips were the key element that led me to the diagnosis of MEN2B". Indeed, he recounts how he had originally dismissed MEN2B because only Lincoln's lower lip showed signs that might be explicable by that diagnosis: Sotos had thought both lips were always affected. Later, he discovered that some MEN2B cases affect only one lip. Voila! MEN2B was a possibility after all. (I cannot now find that passage, though. Sorry.)

On page 240, however, he diagrams how the MEN2B diagnosis explains 50 "observable characteristics".

He does qualify his diagnosis: "The diagram does not show the uncertainty underlying many of the connections. It unmistakably shows, however, that MEN2B has the potential to unify an astonishing number of Lincoln's features under one root cause."

It is unfair to dismiss his diagnosis piecemeal, as it seems to me to have been done on the thread, at least by some: Sotos argues that a multitude of "observable characteristics", some of them highly unusual, that are rarely observed together in one person, are best explained by MEN2B as the underlying cause.