The You&Me Blog

Our third finalist: Woodrow Wilson Ever joked that someone with half-a-brain could do as good a job as a president you don’t particularly care for? Well, people in 1920 got to try that on for real with Woodrow Wilson, president from March 1913 to March 1921 (in those days if you won the November election you didn’t start your actual term until the next March.) Mr. Wilson has had the misfortune of having his medical history extensively examined during the years of Freudian psychology ascendancy but it appears he had probably suffered from cerebral vascular disease for years. He’d had transient...

The medical histories of the past fascinate me. By default, they tend to medical histories of the powerful and famous, because that's the information that people care to study and keep. There's something inspirational, though, in seeing that these people also had their share, and sometimes more than their share, of problems, including medical problems. Presidents, they're just like us! In picking our finalists we looked at two factors--severity of illness and impact on the actual presidency. Here is the amazing history of our first finalist, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Well, of course, the...