How to Fake a Lung Disease and Win the Presidency

Or: The Only Way to Trust the Science is to Forget the History

Poor David McCullough. Perhaps America’s greatest historian, winner of multiple Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and even a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his captivating biographies of the likes of John Adams, Harry Truman, and the Wright Brothers – only to find himself betrayed and humiliated by the nation’s leading doctors.

You see, McCullough made one critical mistake: he trusted the science.

The result? Mornings on Horseback, his otherwise enthralling, National Book Award winning biography of the young Teddy Roosevelt contains an entire chapter of pure, unadulterated poppycock.  

Roosevelt suffered terribly from childhood asthma. Young Teddy’s violent nighttime attacks and the dramatic lengths the family took attempting to alleviate them were a regular feature of life in the Roosevelt household. If only his parents had known he was faking it all along…  

McCullough is no doctor and doesn’t pretend to be. In researching Roosevelt, he studiously avoids irresponsible speculation and does precisely what he ought to have done, what his sterling reputation enables him to do: humbly consult the leading medical minds of the nation.

This is where it all falls apart.

A representative excerpt from McCullough’s chapter on TR’s asthma:

Asthma is repeatedly described as a ‘suppressed cry for the mother’ – a cry of rage as well as a cry for help.

I promise I’m not making that up.

The book was researched in the late 70s and published in 1981, just a few decades ago, hardly the Stone Age, yet the expert medical consensus on asthma at the time was so hilariously wrong – so embarrassingly Freudian – that it does untold harm to McCullough’s otherwise great work.

Science, as Max Planck put it, advances one funeral at a time; McCullough’s timing, alas, was a few funerals short. It seems the widespread, successful treatment of asthma with albuterol inhalers didn’t really take off in America until the mid-to-late 1980s. In fact, the first albuterol inhaler was approved by the FDA the very year Mornings on Horseback was published.

Until life-saving albuterol came around, asthma treatment at our best hospitals appears to have been about as useless in the Carter years as it was in young Teddy’s bedroom a century prior. With no good treatment available, the experts instead authoritatively proclaimed that the violent coughing spasms must all be in their patients’ heads.

More McCullough (all italics in the following quotations are mine):

A view frequently heard among experts in pulmonary medicine is that there is no such thing as a totally nonpsychosomatic case of asthma – a view that, understandably, is often difficult for parents to accept

In retrospect, probably the most difficult part for parents to accept about that expert view is that it was outrageously wrong. In any case, McCullough goes on to explain that, per “a leading authority,” “[a]sthma is now commonly explained to parents as a form of behavior.”

You see (and here you can practically hear old Sigmund’s accent drip from the page), “a present day specialist analyzing [Roosevelt’s] case would take very seriously the fact that his troubles began during the Civil War, when [his father] was away and two new infants arrived on the scene to vie for [his mother’s] attention.”

The science has spoken: asthma is not so much an oxygen-depriving constriction of your airways, it’s more of a suppressed psychological desire to marry your mother. Who knew?

Pictured Here: Oedipus, History’s First Known Asthmatic

Yet I haven’t even gotten to the absolute best, the crème de la crème, the pièce de résistance, the ne plus ultra of wrong-headed, arrogant, corrupt, embarrassingly painful scientific groupthink. Here you go:

asthma is understood to be a psychosomatic disorder, like duodenal ulcers

Now, for those who don’t know, the once-ostracized Dr. Barry Marshall was finally awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005 for his work – begun in 1982, the year Mornings on Horseback came out in paperback – proving that h pylori bacteria played a key role in the (decidedly non-psychosomatic) formation of ulcers.

In other words, every single part of that sentence isn’t just wrong, it’s the opposite of the truth. It would be as outrageously delusional, as inconceivable, as writing something like this: “the mRNA covid vaccine for toddlers is encouraged by the American Academy of Pediatrics because it is safe and effective, like gender affirming care.”

Oh, wait…

And yes, if you’re wondering, the media was all-in on the side of the experts when it came to the Freudian case for asthma. As The New York Times put it in their glowing review of McCullough’s book in 1981, “We know now more than they knew then about the psychosomatic component of an asthma that strikes in the night.” I’m glad the Times has learned humility from this embarrassing error and has worked so hard to remove any unwarranted condescension from their current reporting…

Did anyone ever admit their error, for the presidential historical record? It took a while, but yes! And no, it wasn’t the Times. The 97^th annual meeting of The Theodore Roosevelt Association, in 2016, featured a speech by a Harvard Medical School Professor of Emergency Medicine clarifying that “tremendous strides have been made in our understanding of asthma” since the misconceptions spread by the popularity of Mornings on Horseback, so that medical experts now firmly believe that Teddy Roosevelt’s asthma was not psychosomatic. As the professor puts it, “the field has moved away from the psychoanalytic views espoused only 40-50 years ago.”

Well, I suppose we should be thankful McCullough isn’t researching a sequel to his biography now, or we’d have a whole chapter, relying on America’s preeminent medical authorities, explaining that the formation of The Bull Moose Party was a manifestation of TR’s latent gender nonconformity.

A teenaged Theodore pondering cisheteronormativity

Oh, and speaking of idiotically wrong medical expert consensus, the covid vaccine, and asthma… oops.

VERY URGENT: Covid-19 mRNA vaccines increased the risk of asthma in children, a study of 200,000 kids shows

At least all McCullough’s work led to was a harmless misconception about the childhood asthma of a president. The AAP’s current expert consensus, on the other hand, is actively spreading childhood asthma itself – and it’s definitely not psychosomatic.  

Next time a doctor pressures you to trust the science, ask her if she’s ever treated any patients with asthma – and whether she cured them by telling them not to sleep with any of their parents.

Thank you for reading, don’t let any of the above (or, er, any other mistakes) dissuade you from indulging in McCullough’s fantastic books, and have a wonderful weekend!