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

The lead photograph shows Anna in the center of the frame in her lace wedding gown; her new husband, Curtis, tall and gangly, at the left; and at the right her father, somehow dominating the image, his broad shoulders and powerful chest filling out his tuxedo, looking remarkably strong and fit for a man who was known to have weathered an awful disease.

You had to look carefully at the photograph to see that FDR was grasping the handle of a cane in his left hand. The rest of the cane is hidden behind Anna’s big German shepherd, Chief.

Why, any casual viewer would say, he looks fit as a fiddle.

And he was—in every way except the ability to walk on his own.

But for the moment, the important thing—to FDR and Louis Howe—was that he looked that way.

Chapter 12“HE WAS GETTING READY FOR SOMETHING”

At the end of the summer of 1926, Dr. Leroy Hubbard came in for a long chat.

Hubbard was not a man like Roosevelt, who bubbled over with optimism at the slightest excuse. But two months of observation had persuaded the sober, cautious Hubbard that optimism was justified. Warm Springs appeared to be the real thing.

These were his findings:

Of the twenty-three patients he’d studied—twelve males and eleven females, ages four to forty-four—nearly all had arrived at Warm Springs as “severe” cases with little hope of getting any better. After eight weeks, almost all had achieved notable improvements in mobility. All but one had learned to swim without support. Fred Botts, the singer from Pennsylvania who had come to Warm Springs a year earlier confined entirely to a wheelchair, was now up and walking with one crutch. A twenty-two-year-old man from Massachusetts, completely paralyzed at the start of the summer, was also walking with one crutch. A fifteen-year-old girl had “improved considerably.” A seven-year-old girl “walks considerably better than she did when she came.” A four-year-old boy who had arrived with both legs paralyzed now walked with crutches and was “fearless in the pool.”

“No miracles can be performed at Warm Springs,” Dr. Hubbard would tell his fellow orthopedists. “No false hopes should be aroused in the minds of patients or their families.” Yet he could say beyond a reasonable doubt that “the exercises and warm water under proper supervision give a better hope for fairly rapid improvement in muscle power than any other method with which I am familiar.”

He didn’t know why, exactly. Maybe the same program of exercise and instruction conducted somewhere else would bring the same sort of results. But if so, Dr. Hubbard hadn’t seen it, and he’d been working with polio patients for years. Certainly there was something in the water at Warm Springs—the perfect temperature or the minerals or both—that made it easy to exercise for long periods. In fresh water most people get tired after half an hour, while at Warm Springs the patients could work out for two hours before fatigue set in. That was probably the chief factor—simply that people could exercise for much longer periods than on dry land or in cold water.

But a human factor was at work, too. The patients were helping each other. There was “a psychological effect due to each striving to equal the other in improvement,” Dr. Hubbard said. “Also the fact that these boys and girls deprived of the usual sports are able in the water to rival the normal boy and girl and have a feeling that at least in one sport they can take part.”

We don’t know if the conversation between FDR and Dr. Hubbard turned to FDR’s own case. But we do know what Dr. Hubbard believed about cases like FDR’s, because he stated his views just a few weeks later in his formal report on Warm Springs.

Dr. Hubbard had been looking for two kinds of changes in the patients. First, did they show growing strength in tests of isolated muscle groups? Second, could they use their arms and legs more skillfully in everyday activity?

The doctor observed that the two things usually went together, but not always. He saw that some patients—especially those who had been paralyzed for years—could achieve little or no gain in strength in isolated muscle groups. But they could “obtain quite a considerable improvement in function”—that is, in the ability to move around. Of patients like this, he said, “very few, or perhaps none of them, can expect to come back to normal or approximately normal. The most we can hope for is such a gain in muscle power and functional activity that they can get about … and some of them ultimately pro-gress enough to discard all apparatus” (that is, braces, crutches, or canes).

In other words, such people could not bring dead nerves back to life. But they could learn to walk much better.

As the two men talked that day, did Dr. Hubbard spell out the clear implications for FDR’s own case? Maybe so, maybe not. But even if he didn’t say it out loud, the meaning of Dr. Hubbard’s observations must have struck FDR with full force.

It was the same thing Dr. Lovett and Dr. Draper had hinted at years earlier. FDR had been able to push the message away, believing he would be different. With the special willpower of a Roosevelt and a Delano, he would defy the odds, recover all his strength, and walk again as he once had. But now he was facing the results of a full-out effort to restore as much mobility as possible among people whose cases, on average, were just like his. With proper instruction, they were doing better, even much better, but they were never going to walk normally. To get better meant a lot. But as the doctor said, it was the most they could hope for.

Finally that lesson sank in, or so it seems from what happened next.

Dr. Hubbard had recruited a physical therapist from New York to direct the exercise program at Warm Springs.