Trivial Trivia - taking trivia to new levels

[Eva Elisabeth]

"Apparently, Mr. Lincoln long suffered from a more specific physical disorder – constipation. John Todd Stuart had a peculiar view of Mr. Lincoln’s constitution. He told William Herndon that Mr. Lincoln 'was a kind of vegetable – that the pores of his flesh acted as an appropriate organ for such Evacuation…' 16 He blamed some of Mr. Lincoln’s problems on his digestion and said he had prescribed 'blue mass pills' to deal with the problem. Henry C. Whitney reported that Stuart said: 'Lincoln’s digestion was organically defective so that the excreta escaped through the skin pores instead of the bowels'. Stuart said he 'advised him to take him to take Blue Mass and he did take it before he went to Washington and for five months while he was President but when I went to Congress he told me he had quit because it made him cross.' 17
 
Such blue mass pills included mercury as an ingredient and were intended as a laxative but they were also prescribed for a wide variety of ills. 18 Mercury, according to medical researchers, was prescribed to treat 'hypochondriasis,' which covered a wide range of 'mental and intestinal distress.' 19 Medical speculation has suggested that the mercury might have affected Mr. Lincoln’s physical and mental disposition – causing him irritation and insomnia before he ceased their use in 1861. One medical study in 2001 concluded that Mr. Lincoln might have been unable to handle the presidency had he not stopped using the patent medicine. The authors wrote: 'If blue pills prompted Abraham Lincoln’s remarkable behavior in the decade before he went to the White House, then his insightful decision to stop taking them may have been crucial to the outcome of the Civil War.'20"
 
17 Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln, pp. 631-632 (Letter from Henry C. Whitney to William H. Herndon, August 27, 1887).
18 Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln, p. 466.
19 Norbert Hirschhorn, Robert G. Feldman, and Ian A. Greaves, “Abraham Lincoln’s Blue Pills,”Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Summer 2001, pp. 315-332.
20 Norbert Hirschhorn, Robert G. Feldman, and Ian A. Greaves, “Abraham Lincoln’s Blue Pills: Did Our 16th President Suffer from Mercury Poisoning?” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, p. 329.

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