Health of Abraham Lincoln

[3][4] When he was nine years old, Lincoln was kicked in the head by a horse at the Noah Gordon Mill and was knocked unconscious for several hours.

[5] Other injuries or trauma throughout his life include almost severing one of his thumbs with an axe,[6] incurring frostbite of his feet in 1830–1831,[7] being struck by his wife (apparently on multiple occasions),[8] and being clubbed on the head during a robbery attempt in 1828.

[9] Lincoln was contemporaneously described as suffering from melancholy, a condition that modern mental health professionals would characterize as clinical depression.

[23] During his life Lincoln experienced the death of multiple close family members, including his mother, his sister, and two of his sons, Eddie and Willie.

[24] Mary Lincoln felt her husband to be too trusting, and his melancholy tended to strike at times that he was betrayed or unsupported by those in whom he put faith.

[25] Whether he may have suffered from depression as a genetic predilection, as a reaction to multiple emotional traumas in his life,[24] or a combination thereof is the subject of much current conjecture.

Finding that the blue mass pills made him "cross", Lincoln stopped taking them about August 1861 (5 months after his March inauguration).

[29] The remarkable thing about Lincoln's temper is not how often it erupted, but how seldom it did, considering how frequently he encountered the insolence of epaulets, the abuse of friends and opponents alike, and the egomaniacal selfishness of editors, senators, representatives, governors, cabinet members, generals, and flocks of others who pestered him unmercifully about their own petty concerns.The habitus, or structure, of Lincoln's body attracted attention while he was alive, and continues to attract attention today among medical professionals.

[33] The theory that Lincoln's facial asymmetries were a manifestation of craniofacial microsomia[40] has been replaced with a diagnosis of left synostotic frontal plagiocephaly,[33] which is a type of craniosynostosis.

[43] Lincoln's unremarkable cardiovascular history and his normal visual acuity have been the chief objections to the hypothesis, and today geneticists consider the diagnosis unlikely.

[51] Writing in 2003, biographer David Donald declared, "Modern physicians who have sifted the evidence agree that Lincoln never contracted the disease."