Medical and mental health of Abraham Lincoln

The physical and mental health of Abraham Lincoln has been the subject of both contemporaneous commentary and subsequent hypotheses by historians and scholars.

Despite the following occurrences, Lincoln's health up until middle age was fairly good for his day.

There were fears for young Lincoln's life during a 24-hour period of unconsciousness that followed a horse kicking him in the head. He was nine years old. On another occasion, he fell into a creek and almost drowned.

Lincoln died from a bullet wound to the head in 1865. His other episodes of adult trauma were minor. He was clubbed on the head during a robbery attempt in 1828, was struck by his wife (apparently on multiple occasions), cut his hand with an axe at least once, and incurred frostbite of his feet in 1830-1831

The shape ("habitus") of Lincoln's body attracted attention while he was alive, and continues to attract attention today among medical professionals. Geneticists are now skeptical of the hypothesis that Marfan syndrome was the cause of his unusual habitus (see below).

The theory that Lincoln was afflicted with type 5 spinocerebellar ataxia is no longer accepted. The theory that Lincoln's facial asymmetries were a manifestation of craniofacial microsomia has been replaced with a diagnosis of left synostotic frontal plagiocephaly, which is a type of craniosynostosis.

Lincoln was contemporaneously described as suffering from "melancholy," a condition which modern mental health professionals would characterize as clinical depression.

It was during his time as an Illinois legislator that Joshua Speed said Lincoln anonymously published a suicide poem in the Sangamo Journal; though he was not sure of the date, a suicide poem was published on August 25, 1838, making Lincoln 29 years of age. The poem is called The Suicide's Soliloquy; historians are still divided on whether or not Lincoln was the author.

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

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