There are many aspects of Abraham Lincoln which interest me, not least his attributes of leadership, his contribution and interest in innovation, and his possible underlying diagnosis.
Abraham Lincoln is a model for a charismatic leader, having been well-known to be a great story-teller, as explained here:
“Watching the superb film “Lincoln” by Steven Spielberg, I discovered a very important fact about our 16thPresident that I wasn’t really aware of. He was a great storyteller. I knew he was strong in his speechmaking (having memorized the Gettysburg Address in Grade School, along with countless other youngsters), but I didn’t know how skillfully he used the power of story to lead and inspire, to defuse tension and to stir an audience. He was an expert in using powerful language, imagery and humor to get across key points, to open listeners’ ears to another point of view, and to convey practical advice and wisdom that people then wanted and needed to retell themselves. He didn’t force his messages on his audience, he let in unfold in their own imaginations.”
Lincoln was apparently also a great inventor, and many consider him to be the “father of innovation” in the United States. As an attorney, he represented railroads. During the Civil War, he haunted the telegraph office (which provided the instant-messaging of its day) for the latest news from the front and was actively involved in directing troops. He encouraged weapons development and even tested some new rifles himself on the White House lawn. Patent No. 6469, a device for buoying vessels over shoals, makes Abraham Lincoln the only U.S. president to hold a patent. From The New Atlantis, it is described that:
“As a young man, Lincoln had spent some time on riverboats, transporting farm produce and other cargo down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. In 1848, then-Congressman Lincoln was a passenger on a boat in shallow Illinois waters when a passing boat ran into a sandbar. He watched as the captain ordered his crew to place anything that would float—especially empty barrels and boxes—under the sides of the boat for buoyancy. That incident was the direct inspiration for Lincoln’s invention: “buoyant air chambers” made of “water-proof fabric”; they could be inflated and deflated as needed to help keep a boat afloat.”
Although Lincoln was a weapons aficionado, perhaps his greatest contribution to the war effort was his use of the telegraph. Tom Wheeler, author of Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War, notes that Lincoln had not even seen a telegraph in operation until 1857. That was twenty-two years before the invention of the light bulb, a time when electricity was a vague scientific concept and sending signals through wires “mind boggling.” Lincoln was fascinated and quizzed the operator about how the telegraph worked. “If he were alive today, we’d call him an early adopter,” says Wheeler.
There has been a longstanding controversy about what the clinical diagnosis of Abraham Lincoln was. The nature and cause of President Abraham Lincoln’s unusual physical features have long been debated, with the greatest attention, recently, directed at two monogenic disorders of the transforming growth factor ? system: Marfan syndrome and multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2B (“MEN 2B”). MEN 2B typically manifests before a child is ten years old. Affected individuals tend to be tall and lanky, with an elongated face and protruding, blubbery lips. Benign tumors can develop in the mouth, eyes, and submucosa of almost all organs in the first decade of life. Medullary thyroid cancer almost always occurs, sometimes in infancy, and is often aggressive. Cancer of the adrenal glands, phaeochromocytomas (sic), occurs in 50% of cases.
Recent work has examined newly discovered phenotypical information about Lincoln’s biological mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and concluded that (a) Lincoln’s mother was skeletally marfanoid, (b) the President and his mother were highly concordant for the presence of numerous facial features found in various transforming growth factor ? disorders, and (c) Lincoln’s mother, like her son, had hypotonic skeletal muscles, resulting in myopathic facies and ‘pseudodepression’. These conclusions establish that mother and son had the same monogenic autosomal dominant marfanoid disorder. A description of Nancy Hanks Lincoln as coarse-featured, and a little-known statement that a wasting disease contributed to her death at age 34, lends support to the multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2B hypothesis.
A Californian cardiologist John G. Sotos of Palo Alto came up with the idea that the 16th American president suffered from a mutation named MEN 2B that could be easily tracked down through DNA analysis of the gene RET on chromosome 10. MEN 2B (multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2B) leads in 100 % of the cases to thyroid cancer and 50 % of the patients also develop adrenal gland cancer and could explain Lincol’s great height and other conditions.
Anyway, I wish Daniel Day-Lewis well in his nomination for Best Actor for “Lincoln” this morning. I bet my life he wins.
