lincoln in springfield

[Eva Elisabeth]

I remember reading it here, Roger:
http://www.lincolnportrait.com/emotional...lopia.html
"The earliest evidence of Lincoln's visual decoordination has been recorded by Shastid,{23} as told to him by his father, Dr. Shastid, an oculist who practiced in Pittsfield, Ill. The elder Dr. Shastid, when a boy, lived in New Salem and knew Abe Lincoln, then in his mid-twenties, as the storekeeper and postmaster of the town...Shastid noticed that Lincoln's left eye looked queer at times and would suddenly get crossed and turn upward.
Some 20 years later, when a physician and oculist, Shastid saw Lincoln in several debates with Douglas and in several trials in court as a lawyer. He then recognized the ocular condition as hyperphoria from a certain weakness of the muscles of the left eye, which continuously caused the eyeball to turn upward. Upon excitement this condition would suddenly increase and produce a severe cross-eyed effect. Dr. Shastid suggested that the hyperphoria caused intense eyestrain and uneasiness and was at least partly the cause of Lincoln's moodiness or 'chronic inexpressible blues.' He thought that Lincoln possibly was also color-blind, for Lincoln once said to his (Shastid’s) mother, when she showed him her flower garden, that flowers and sunsets had no beauty for him, as they did for other people."