The Health of the First Ladies: Medical Histories from Martha Washington to Michelle Obama (35 page)

Julia Tyler, the young second wife of John Tyler, bore her husband seven children after the White House (Library of Congress).

A beautiful young bride in the White House was certain to attract attention and popular favor, as did the young and elegant first ladies Frankie Cleveland and Jackie Kennedy years later. Julia Tyler was determined to make her social mark in the few months available to her. She succeeded by very active and elaborate entertaining. The new first lady also was clever in soliciting favorable coverage by the press. The appellation “The Lovely Lady Presidentress” resulted from her efforts.
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Her residency in the White House may have been too brief for her thirty-year-older husband to demonstrate his virility or Julia her fecundity—but not for long. The first offspring from Julia’s wedding to John appeared on July 12, 1846, fifteen months after the Tyler’s departure from the White House. Six additional baby Tylers graced the ex-president’s second family.
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The widow Tyler survived until July 10, 1889, outliving her husband by 28 years. There were no significant medical issues reported by historians.

Lou Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman and Lady Bird Johnson

These four women, except for the two terms of Mamie Eisenhower and the truncated tenure of Jacqueline Kennedy, occupied the White House from 1929 to 1969. Each of the four brought significant strengths to the White House. Moreover their good health was an asset and not an inconvenience; neither sickness nor physical difficulties encumbered their presidential husbands. Responsibilities as first lady did not impair their health. At least one, Bess Truman, neither desired nor especially enjoyed her time in the executive mansion. Therefore, the discussion of each will be brief and their histories will be economical but pithy.

Lou Hoover, the wife of Herbert Hoover, was a very healthy first lady (Library of Congress).

“Few political wives were alike as Lou and Eleanor. Both addressed controversial issues, did magazine writing, vigorously advocated that women become active in politics, and were political advisors to their husbands.”
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Mrs. Hoover was smart, accomplished, physically fit and adventurous. She graduated from Stanford University with a degree in geology, one of the first, if not the first, American woman with a degree in that field. Soon after graduation she married Herbert Hoover, who became a very successful and wealthy mining engineer. They spent their first years together in China and later visited and worked in many parts of the world. Lou became more than Herbert’s mate; she was an equal partner and an invaluable political advisor in the White House.
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Among her numerous volunteer activities, the Girl Scout organization was preeminent.
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Mrs. Hoover was healthy until her sudden death from a heart attack in New York City on January 7, 1944, when she was 69 years old.
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Her
New York Times
obituary observed: “Mrs. Hoover brought to the White House as cosmopolitan a background as a woman could have, one which commentators have found hard to parallel without going back to Mrs. John Quincy Adams.”
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The Hoovers raised two sons: Herbert Hoover Junior, born March 1905, and Allan Henry Hoover, born July 1907.
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The medical gadfly Joel Boone became the chief White House physician and personal doctor to the Hoover family. He had enjoyed previous social interactions with the Hoovers while the future president served as secretary of commerce in both the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Dr. Boone’s voluminous writings provide a quotable source for Lou Hoover’s doings in and around the White House. When the Hoovers accompanied President and Mrs. Harding to Alaska aboard the USS
Henderson
, “Mrs. Hoover … asked Boone to teach her to dance.” Later, in the White House: “[Boone] recently had had a conversation with Mrs. Hoover about a preparatory school for her nephew that led to enrollment at Boone’s beloved Mercersburg Academy.”
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In the autumn of 1930, Herbert Hoover, Jr. returned to Washington, D.C., suffering from a rapid twenty-pound weight loss. Boone was asked by the president to examine his son. A subsequent chest X-ray looked suspicious for tuberculosis. To avoid publicity (Boone was good at this) the doctor assigned a fictitious patient name to Herbert Jr. and asked Dr. Louis Hamman, “who had been chief of tuberculosis work at Johns Hopkins,” to meet with the patient, not at the White House, but at Boone’s apartment. After an examination, Hamman reviewed his chest X-rays at the Washington Navy Hospital and concluded, “There is absolutely no question that this is a tubercular infection.” Boone prescribed a several-month regimen of rest, diet and isolation.
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His supervision of young Hoover’s care continued; in October Boone announced that Herbert Hoover, Jr. would be taken the following month to Asheville, North Carolina, for treatment. Ashville’s climate was sound and it was also proximate to Washington.
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This event documented Boone’s medical competence, his sensitivity to patient confidentiality, and a predilection to employ experts from the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions as consultants. In summation, Boone wrote: “Mrs. Hoover enjoyed good health—certainly better than Mrs. Harding’s—but was such a busy person and so caught up in activities of her husband that her health could suffer.”
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“Claiming that her wheelchair-bound husband, crippled by polio, needed her as his eyes and ears, hands and feet, she became the most ubiquitous First Lady in history.”
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Eleanor Roosevelt was a very different type of first lady, one who doffed the social and ceremonial roles previously deemed essential in a first lady’s job description. Also absent were the traditional wifely activities of companion and protector. Mrs. Roosevelt, psychologically damaged by an earlier affair between her husband and her own social secretary, embraced an exaggerated political role, often tinged with hostility towards, and frequently disruptive and distracting for, President Roosevelt.
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Mrs. Roosevelt remains the longest-serving American first lady (twelve years, two months), and is the most admired. Polls consistently rank her as the nation’s most successful first lady.
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Her public persona, if anything, increased after her husband’s death in April 1945. She was a dominant actor upon the national and international stage for the remaining seventeen years of her life as she energetically pursued goals of peace, civil rights, and women’s enrichment.

Excellent health, with few exceptions, was her companion before, during, and after her White House years, Her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Hall, entrusted with Eleanor’s upbringing after the early deaths of both parents, alerted the headmistress of London’s Allenswood finishing school that the teenage Eleanor was in delicate health. Mlle. Souvestre disagreed: “She does not any more suffer of the complaints you told me about. She has a good sleep, a good appetite, is very rarely troubled with headaches and is always ready to enjoy her life.”
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Mrs. Roosevelt was pregnant six times. Her first child, Anna, was born after a difficult nine months, and the pregnancy was marked by nausea. All the other children were boys. The third child and second son perished from heart disease before his first birthday.
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A rare exception to her good health occurred in 1912. Both Eleanor and Franklin were downed by typhoid fever. Its usual symptoms are high fever, abdominal pain, weakness and loss of appetite. The future first lady’s symptoms are unrecorded other than that it was a week before her temperature began to subside.
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Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt. To date she is the longest serving first lady (Library of Congress).

Eleanor Roosevelt lived for seventeen years after FDR’s death and died at age seventy-eight in December 1962. She was prodigiously active well past her seventieth birthday; her energy began to wane only in early 1960. She was knocked down by a driver who “carelessly backed a station wagon into her as she was crossing a Greenwich Village, Manhattan street to a charity meeting. David Gurewitsch taped up her leg, but despite torn ligaments she continued with her engagements for the day.”
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Dr. David Gurewitsch was “Eleanor Roosevelt’s friend, confidant, personal physician, housemate, and traveling companion during her post–White House years.” She met the doctor in 1944 in New York City. After she relocated to New York from Washington, she asked Gurewitsch to become her personal physician. Their relationship was briefly interrupted when the doctor required overseas treatment for tuberculosis.
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In early 1960 David Gurewitsch diagnosed aplastic anemia as the cause of his patient’s decreased energy. “The illness would flicker and subside—infections, fevers, chills, and aches. She dealt with them by ignoring them.”
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The cause of aplastic anemia is often unknown. Approximately six months before her demise, Mrs. Roosevelt was treated with steroids because the anemia had worsened to affect platelet formation. The platelet count decreased to such an extent that internal bleeding became a possibility. Steroid therapy has frequent side effects, and it reactivated an old tuberculosis scar in Mrs. Roosevelt’s lung. Tuberculous bacilli spread throughout her body. She realized that death was imminent and demanded release from the hospital to die at home, which she did three weeks later.
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It is fitting that one of the final decisions of this most political of presidential wives be placed in a political context. Dr. Barron H. Lerner, writing for the liberal
Huffington Post
, used Mrs. Roosevelt’s resistance to very expensive terminal care within a hospital as an argument in favor of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare. Lerner wrote in October 2012: “Hospitals remain full of elderly patients as or more ill than Eleanor Roosevelt receiving aggressive and expensive medical interventions ranging from ventilators to hemodialysis to intensive care. Even when they prolong life, they often cannot reverse terminal conditions. The ACA is a wonderful opportunity for us to reassess the true value of medical treatments…. There is something to be said for dying at home like Eleanor Roosevelt did—unattached to any machines.”
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Upon hearing from her husband, the vice president, that President Roosevelt had died, “Bess put down the telephone and began to cry. She made her way down the hall to her daughter’s bedroom, sobbing so hard that she could barely speak.”
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On June 28, 1919, 34-year-old Bess Wallace married 35-year-old Harry Truman in the small Trinity Episcopal Church in her hometown of Independence, Missouri. It was the first and only marriage for both; the Trumans embarked on a happy and very successful partnership that terminated with Harry’s death fifty-three years later on December 26, 1972.
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Bess experienced two miscarriages, in 1920 and in 1922 when she was 35 and 37 years old. Unhappy about the losses, she feared that she had waited too long for a pregnancy. However, nearing the advanced maternal age of forty, “Bess gave birth to Mary Margaret Truman in an upstairs bedroom at 219 North Delaware and made a bed for her in a bureau drawer.”
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Margaret’s happy delivery on February 17, 1924, concluded her mother’s obstetrical history.

Excellent health, Midwestern common sense, and a deeply respectful and honest relationship with her husband permitted the first lady to be a reliable and effective sounding-board for President Harry Truman (1945–1953). The president publicly referred to his wife as “the boss.” Although she had a passion for anonymity, Bess was a full partner in Harry’s presidential decisions.
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