Master of His Fate by James Tobin (free ebooks for android txt) 📗

“I thought all our histories lacked movement and a sense of direction. The nation was clearly going somewhere right from the first. I thought I could do better with those ideas than had been done before.”

He sent streams of letters to all parts of the country, keeping in touch with Democrats, college friends, navy friends, aunts, uncles, cousins, and countless others, including other people with polio, trading encouragement and ideas for treatments and exercises.

And he read more than he ever had, especially about the past.

“Roosevelt was a walking American history book,” Frances Perkins said. “He knew exactly how the troops went here and there … He knew exactly what the trading towns were and the trading routes across the valleys.” Yet he might also spend half a day reading a book on edible plants.

So his nurses were right. He wasn’t doing his exercises as much as he should have, or even as much as he meant to. He was living a full life and stocking his mind with a thousand nuggets of knowledge.

But he was hardly any closer to walking on his own than he had been on the day he first stood up with crutches.

In the spring of 1923, nearly two years since the poliovirus had struck, Dr. Lovett tested the strength of forty-four of FDR’s muscles, the same ones he had tested a year earlier. Seven were slightly stronger. Seven were a little weaker. Thirty showed no difference at all.

But month after month, FDR insisted to friends that he was getting better all the time:

APRIL 1923: “My legs are a lot better.”

JUNE 1923: “My doctor … is delighted with my progress.”

JULY 1923: “Though I am still on crutches I hope to be able to discard them very soon.”

OCTOBER 1923: “A cheerful doctor friend of mine … said to me the other day … ‘You … will get better year by year.’”

JANUARY 1924: “The old legs are coming along in good shape, and I am hopeful that by the end of the year I can get off at least one crutch and perhaps a brace.”

FEBRUARY 1924: “The legs … are improving steadily.”

He struggled to find something that would make his optimistic predictions come true.

In newspapers and magazines, in letters that came to him from doctors and other polio patients, FDR searched for clues that might lead to a breakthrough treatment. He never fell for the fake doctors and con artists who tried to sell outlandish medical schemes to desperate patients. (He laughed at ads for one “quack medicine” after another. “It may be monkey glands or perhaps it is made out of the dried eyes of the extinct three-toed rhinoceros,” he wrote Dr. Draper. “You doctors have sure got imaginations!”) But he was open to any experiment or device that seemed to be truly worth a try, whether to strengthen his legs or improve his ability to get around by mechanical means.

He sent for information about a doctor who treated patients by sealing them into a pressurized steel tube as big as a railroad car.

He considered advice about the Whiteley Exerciser, a wall-mounted contraption with rubber cables attached to the patient’s legs, and an electric-powered wheelchair that could carry its passenger at a rate of forty miles per hour.

He tried an adult-sized tricycle.

He installed “an old-fashioned children’s double-swing” that seemed “to develop the knee muscles in a splendid way.”

He studied the designs of Gabriel Bidou, a French doctor who was equipping paralyzed patients with spring-loaded leg braces. “There is no question that the French are far ahead of us in their mechanical appliances,” he wrote to a friend with polio. “If you and I do not greatly improve this coming winter [1923–1924] we shall have to get together and work out something along the line of Dr. Bidou’s springs.”

When he heard about two doctors from Kansas City who were treating their patients with rays from powerful electric lamps, he recalled his experience in the Florida sun and invited the doctors to visit him. Their names were Starr and Barrett. They were osteopaths—doctors who use a system of healing that works more by manipulating patients’ body parts than by giving them drugs.

FDR told Starr and Barrett all about his symptoms and the treatments he had tried, then listened closely to what they said. He was impressed, and he wanted to know if their advice was safe. But he knew Dr. Lovett was just about fed up with his enthusiasm for unusual treatments. So he went around Lovett’s back.

He wrote to Nurse Lake, saying the letter was just “for your personal and confidential information.” He told her the doctors from Kansas City had confirmed his opinion about the good effects of sunlight on damaged nerves. The new doctors had told him “that as I am going at present, the process of muscular development will be very long drawn out, and that the only method of hastening matters is by going to the seat of the trouble—i.e., the nerve cells—and building them up faster than they are building at present. They therefore suggest that I start up here at Hyde Park with a simple light machine … i.e., taking an artificial sunbath in my room all over the body for about an hour every morning.”

This was “absolutely in line with the undoubted fact which I discovered for myself, that the sun down in Florida, and since I have been up here, has done much to keep the circulation going. For instance, it is absolutely a fact that the mornings I am able to sit in the sun for an hour or two my legs do not get cold in the evening, whereas if the day is cloudy and I do not get my sun bath, the legs freeze up from about 5 p.m. on.

“Don’t you (in your purely private and non-professional capacity) agree that it can do no harm to try [the sun-lamp] out at least for a month or two?”

FDR was determined that Dr. Lovett must not know about this new treatment. “I have impressed on Starr