Presidential health secrets: reclaiming history's medical unknowns
Journal: Maryland Shared Open Access Repository (USMAI Consortium)
Year: 2017

This thesis analyzes the role of illness in the administrations of three twentieth-century presidents—Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), and John F. Kennedy (JFK)—who had serious health problems unknown to the mass media and the public in their respective eras. Some of that hidden information has been uncovered by historians and others. Wilson, for example, had a devastating stroke in October 1919, after which his wife and physician hid him in the White House, with the former functioni