The physical and mental health of Abraham Lincoln has been the subject of both contemporaneous commentary and subsequent hypotheses by historians and scholars.
Contents
Physical health
Despite the following occurrences, Lincoln's health up until middle age was fairly good for his day.
Childhood
There were fears for young Lincoln's life during a 24-hour period of unconsciousness that followed a horse kicking him in the head. He was nine years old. On another occasion, he fell into a creek and almost drowned.
Infectious disease
Trauma
Lincoln died from a bullet wound to the head in 1865. His other episodes of adult trauma were minor. He was clubbed on the head during a robbery attempt in 1828, was struck by his wife (apparently on multiple occasions), cut his hand with an axe at least once, and incurred frostbite of his feet in 1830-1831
Body habitus
The shape ("habitus") of Lincoln's body attracted attention while he was alive, and continues to attract attention today among medical professionals. Geneticists are now skeptical of the hypothesis that Marfan syndrome was the cause of his unusual habitus (see below).
Other
The theory that Lincoln was afflicted with type 5 spinocerebellar ataxia is no longer accepted. The theory that Lincoln's facial asymmetries were a manifestation of craniofacial microsomia has been replaced with a diagnosis of left synostotic frontal plagiocephaly, which is a type of craniosynostosis.
Mental health
Lincoln was contemporaneously described as suffering from "melancholy," a condition which modern mental health professionals would characterize as clinical depression.
It was during his time as an Illinois legislator that Joshua Speed said Lincoln anonymously published a suicide poem in the Sangamo Journal; though he was not sure of the date, a suicide poem was published on August 25, 1838, making Lincoln 29 years of age. The poem is called The Suicide's Soliloquy; historians are still divided on whether or not Lincoln was the author.
Whether he may have suffered from depression as a genetic predilection, as a reaction to multiple emotional traumas in his life, or a combination thereof is the subject of much current conjecture.
Lincoln suffered depressed mood after major traumatic events, such as the death of Ann Rutledge in August 1835, the cessation of his (purported) engagement to Mary Todd Lincoln in January 1841 (after which several close associates feared Lincoln's suicide), and after the Second Battle of Bull Run. However, it is not clear that any of these episodes meet modern medical criteria for depression.
Mary Lincoln felt her husband to be too trusting, and his melancholy tended to strike at times he was betrayed or unsupported by those in whom he put faith.
Lincoln would often combat his melancholic moods by delving into works of humor, likely a healthy coping mechanism for his depression.
It has been proposed that Lincoln took "blue mass" pills to improve his mood. There is, however, no support for this in the written record. (See "Medication" section, below.)
Medication
The recollections of Lincoln's legal colleagues (John Stuart, Henry Whitney, Ward Lamon, and William Herndon) all agree that Lincoln took blue mass pills because of constipation (constipation is a troubling symptom in Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia Type 2B, described above). The active ingredient of blue mass is elemental mercury – a substance now known to be a neurotoxin in its vaporic state. Whether mercury poisoning may have affected Lincoln's demeanor before or after he ceased its use in 1861 is unknown, but still remains the subject of conjecture by some historians. Lincoln's only known assessments of the medication are that it made him "cross" but that he preferred it above others.
In 1865, speaking with the Washington correspondent of the Pittsburgh Chronicle, Mrs. Lincoln described an instance in which her husband's "usual medicine," the mercury based "blue pills" made him terribly ill. The correspondent recorded the interview as follows: Mrs. Lincoln "recalled the fact that her husband had been very ill, for several days, from the effects of a dose of blue pills taken shortly before his second inauguration." She said he was not well, and appearing to require his usual medicine, blue pills, she sent to the drug store in which Harrold was employed last and got a dose and gave them to him at night before going to bed, and that next morning his pallor terrified her. 'His face,' said she, pointing to the bed beside which she sat, 'was white as that pillow-case, as it lay just there,' she exclaimed, laying her hand on the pillow—'white, and such a deadly white; as he tried to rise he sank back again quite overcome!' She described his anxiety to be up, there was so much to do, and her persistence and his oppressive languor in keeping him in bed for several days; said he and she both thought it so strange that the pills should affect him in that way; they never had done so before, and both concluded they would get no more medicine there, as the attendant evidently did not understand making up prescriptions."