Paralytic illness of Franklin D. Roosevelt
Roosevelt remained paralyzed from the waist down and relied on a wheelchair and leg braces for mobility, which he took efforts to conceal in public.
On August 9, 1921, 39-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the time a practicing lawyer in New York City, joined his family at their vacation home at Campobello, a Canadian island off the coast of Maine.
He faced many life-threatening medical problems including the possibility of respiratory failure, urinary tract infection, injury to the urethra or bladder, decubitus ulcers, clots in the leg veins, and malnutrition.
Levine said the senior members of the Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission, Dr. Lovett and Dr. Peabody, were out of town, but he would try to answer Delano's questions.
He urged that a lumbar puncture be done, with the goal of making a diagnosis, but mainly because Levine believed there could be acute benefit from the procedure.
[1]: 64–65, 327 [3]: 192 [self-published source] Delano phoned and wrote Eleanor the same day,[2]: 239 advising her to stop massaging Roosevelt's legs, and to disregard Keen's advice: "I think it would be very unwise to trust his diagnosis where the Inf.
Robert Lovett, an expert on the orthopedic management of children paralyzed from poliomyelitis, diagnosed "infantile paralysis", as did George Draper, Roosevelt's personal physician.
[7]: 455 In 1921, an American physician would assume that if an individual developed a sudden, non-traumatic flaccid paralysis, it was due to paralytic polio.
The chauffeur assisting him failed to brace the tip of his left crutch and Roosevelt fell onto the highly polished lobby floor.
Eleanor found it dull and left, but Roosevelt sailed for weeks, fishing and spending time with a succession of friends who came to visit.
[5]: 247–249 "Between 1925 and 1928, Franklin would spend more than half his time—116 of 208 weeks—away from home, struggling to find a way to regain his feet," wrote biographer Geoffrey Ward.
"[5]: 248 Roosevelt lost the use of his legs and two inches of height, but the subsequent development of the rest of his body gave him a robust physique, and he enjoyed many years of excellent health.
Jack Dempsey praised his upper-body musculature, and Roosevelt once landed a 237-pound (107.5 kg) shark after fighting it on his line for two hours.
With his physiotherapist at Warm Springs, Roosevelt laboriously taught himself to walk short distances while wearing iron braces on his hips and legs, by swiveling his torso.
[4]: 88–105 Roosevelt took great care to convince even close confidants that he was getting better, which he believed was essential if he was to run for public office again.
[12] His public appearances were carefully choreographed to avoid the press covering his arrival and departure, which would have shown him getting into or out of a vehicle or train.
[4]: 88–105 Journalist John Gunther reported that in the 1930s, he often met people in Europe, including world leaders, who were unaware of Roosevelt's paralysis.
[11]: 239 David Brinkley, who was a young White House reporter in World War II, stated that the Secret Service actively interfered with photographers who tried to take photos of Roosevelt in a wheelchair or being moved about by others.
"[1]: 273 When Roosevelt addressed Congress in person on March 1, 1945, about a month before his death, he made public reference to his disability for almost the first time in 20 years.
[11]: 36 "I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down," Roosevelt began, "but I know you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs.
The two-week interval before the onset of his neurological illness was in keeping with both the incubation period of poliomyelitis,[1]: 13–30 and with exposure to an infectious agent leading to GBS.
[3]: 195 [self-published source] Several authors have stated that Roosevelt was more vulnerable to polio since he was raised on an isolated family estate[10] and had little contact with other children until he entered Groton at age 14.
[3]: 246 [self-published source] A 2014 biography of Roosevelt by James Tobin focused on his paralysis, accepting the original diagnosis of polio.
Tobin believed that Lovett had tested the diagnosis with a lumbar puncture, based on excerpts from an "unpublished note" by Dr. Samuel A. Levine of the Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission.
The book stated, "Levine's private note indicates that Dr. Lovett did examine the cerebrospinal fluid and knew very well that a high level of white blood cells was consistent with poliomyelitis...
If Lovett had discovered a low white blood cell count, he would have doubted that poliomyelitis was the cause of Roosevelt's illness.
The authors concluded that Roosevelt's case provided sufficient information to differentiate his condition from GBS, and that the polio diagnosis was properly made by physicians familiar with the then-common disease.
"[26] Levine mistakenly thought that the main benefit of a spinal tap, if done, would be to improve the outcome by lowering elevated cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pressure.
[3]: 192 [self-published source] According to Tobin, some authors mistakenly believe that Roosevelt's paralysis, assuming a polio diagnosis, could have been prevented with early intervention.
Lovett did not think the injections were useful, and there were alarming meningeal symptoms associated with them, probably secondary to the formation of Immune complexantigen-antibody complexes.
