And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 07:21:39 -0700
From: "D. E." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Andrew Jackson, AKA "that S.O.B. who passed the Indian Removal Act"
seems to have suffered from lead poisoning due to a bullet lodged in his
shoulder in 1813. This explains his sevre mood swings, irritability,
paranoia and kidney failure. The article from the NY Times is below
Jackson Had Lead Poisoning
Hair study puts blame on bullet in shoulder
New York Times
Wednesday, August 11, 1999
©1999 San Francisco Chronicle
URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/08/11/MN95847.DTL
Andrew Jackson survived the War of 1812 and many campaigns against American Indians,
only to be felled by his own physicians -- at least, that is what many historians have
long believed. The seventh president's doctors, they argued, subjected him to decades
of ill health, and may even have hastened his death, by overdosing him with the
mercury-containing medications of his time.
But scientists analyzing long-treasured snippets of Jackson's hair now have come up
with evidence that gets his doctors off the hook. Their findings, they report in
today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest instead that
the former president's chronic health problems were partly caused by lead poisoning
from a bullet that lodged in his left shoulder in 1813 and stayed there for almost 20
years.
Analysis of two samples of Jackson's hair, clipped in 1815 and 1839, wrote Dr. Ludwig
Deppisch, professor of pathology at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of
Medicine and lead author of the study, failed to show toxic levels of mercury, despite
Jackson's heavy use of calomel, a mercury-containing medication he took for
constipation.
``Calomel was the aspirin of the early 19th century,'' Deppisch said. ``People took it
for everything.'' But in Jackson's case, he said, ``It wasn't the mercury that killed
him.''
Nor were the mercury levels in Jackson's hair high enough to account for many of the
symptoms -- including severe mood swings, irritability, paranoia and eventual kidney
failure -- that plagued Jackson for the last 30 years of his life and often have been
ascribed to chronic mercury poisoning.
Deppisch's team did find high lead levels, however, in the sample of Jackson's hair
clipped at age 48 in 1815, 13 years before he was elected president. The hair was
clipped as a memento for one of the general's admirers, and it was obtained from a
collection of similar snippets now housed at the Hermitage, Jackson's Tennessee home.
The home is now a museum and research archive.
Two years earlier, in 1813, a lead bullet had shattered Jackson's left shoulder, and
he began complaining of severe abdominal cramps and constipation around that time.
Although the bullet was surgically removed in 1832, at the midpoint of his White House
years, the operation occasioned only a transient improvement in Jackson's health.
``We can explain many of Jackson's intestinal problems on the basis of lead colic,''
Deppisch said. Lead colic is a symptom of lead poisoning and takes the form of
excruciating intermittent abdominal pains. The mercury-based calomel Jackson took in
heavy doses may have exacerbated his intestinal problems, Deppisch said.
Two separate lead tests on a lock of Jackson's hair from 1815 contained lead levels of
105 and 156 parts per million, the scientists found. ``If you match out the hair
levels to blood lead levels, that would come out to about 20 micrograms per
deciliter,'' said David Gemmel, director of research at Forum Health hospital in
Youngstown, Ohio, who collaborated with Deppisch on this project. Symptoms of lead
poisoning may be seen when blood lead levels reach this level, Gemmel said. Dr. John
Rosen, a professor of pediatrics at Montefiore Medical Center in New York and an
expert on lead poisoning, who was not involved with the study, said, ``Hair lead
levels are difficult to interpret because of analytic concerns,'' and it is impossible
to reliably correlate blood and hair lead levels. Still, he said, Jackson's history
and symptoms are consistent with adult lead poisoning.
Jackson died in 1845 at age 78, but by his early 50s, his health had deteriorated so
profoundly that ``there wasn't a day of his life that he wasn't uncomfortable,'' said
Dr. Robert Remini, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, who is the author of many books about Jackson, including a three-volume
biography.
©1999 San Francisco Chronicle Page A2
Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine
of international copyright law.
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http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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