The source that Abraham Lincoln had been infected with syphilis is none other than Lincoln himself, according to his biographer, friend, and law partner, William Herndon. In a letter to his co-author, Herndon wrote: "When I was in Greencastle in 1887, I said to you that Lincoln had, when a mere boy, the syphilis, and now let me explain the matter in full, which I have never done before. About the year 1835-36, Mr. Lincoln went to Beardstown and during a devilish passion had connection with a girl and caught the disease. Lincoln told me this and in a moment of folly I made note of it in my mind and afterwards I transferred it, as it were, to a little memorandum book which I loaned to Lamon, not, as I should have done, erasing that note. About the year 1836-37 Lincoln moved to Springfield and took up quarter with [Joshua] Speed; they became very intimate. At this time I suppose that the disease hung to him, and not wanting to trust our physicians, wrote a note to Doctor Drake."
In my chapter on Lincoln, I made the point that there is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence that Lincoln did have syphilis, and that he was probably taking the "little blue mercury pills" not for melancholia as has been suggested, but for on-going syphilis.
What is remarkable about this whole story is how it has been almost completely ignored in the vast Lincoln scholarship. The question of whether or not Lincoln had syphilis, and how good the clinical evidence of that is, demands further research. But there is a more interesting question. What if Lincoln believed that he had syphilis? And why have there been so many biographies of Lincoln that don't even mention Herndon's letter, let alone ponder the implications?
Gore Vidal is about the only one who brought the whole thing into the open, when he said on the Larry King television program, that both Abraham and Mary Lincoln were infected with syphilis. But he didn't do his homework to pull together a convincing story -- and he didn't have Norbert Hirschhorn's two articles -- the one showing that the "blue mass" that Lincoln took was mercury, or the one showing that Mary Todd's four doctors in 1882 almost assuredly believed that she was suffering from tertiary syphilis in the form of tabes dorsalis. (I make the point in my chapter that Mary Todd's mental imbalance points toward a diagnosis of taboparesis-- that is, both tabes and paresis, but that is another story.
Douglas L. Wilson (co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois) mentions the Herndon-Greencastle passage in an article in the Atlantic, but he leaves it without comment, although he does deal with it in a bit more detail in Honor's Voice, his 1998 biography of Lincoln.
So -- this question is posed to the Lincoln scholars: what difference does it make to our view of Lincoln and his place in history is he was, as he said to Herndon, another secret syphilitic?
I'm tempted to write to a handful of Lincoln scholars and ask them this question.
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