Lincoln Sign

Abstract

Was the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, a bearer of Marfan syndrome and did he suffer from aortic regurgitation? In 1964, there appeared an article by Harold Schwartz, published in the Journal of American Medical Association, which gave birth to a hypothesis that deteriorating health condition of president Lincoln during his second term of office—before his violent death—was not a result of exhaustion from the ongoing civil war but of a serious health problem [1]. The author has come to his conclusions on a basis of treatment of 7-year-old boy with Marfan syndrome whose genealogy was traced back to Mordechai Lincoln II, the great-great-grandfather of Abraham Lincoln. Since clear clinical evidence is naturally missing due to historical limitations (not even a blood pressure could be measured in Lincoln days to document eventual systolic-diastolic amplitude), the paper keeps to be rather a keen combination of indicia and reflections reminding the conclusions of Sherlock Holmes.