![]() ![]() "I talked to a couple of oral surgeons researching the book, and they still marvel at this operation: that they were able to do this on a moving boat they did it very quickly. I mean, it was really foolhardy," Algeo says. The surgeons managed to extract the tumor through the president's mouth, which meant there was no noticeable scarring and the president's trademark mustache was left untouched - key conditions for keeping the public in the dark.Īlgeo says the operation was an extraordinary achievement in American medicine. They used ether as the anesthesia and they removed the tumor along with about five teeth and a large part of the president's upper left jawbone." "And it was on that yacht that this operation was performed," Algeo says. The plan was for the president to announce he was taking a friend's yacht, the Oneida, on a four-day fishing trip from New York to his summer home in Cape Cod. So Cleveland decided to have the tumor secretly removed. Newspapers would call it 'the dread disease.'" "It was an even bigger deal then because at the time there was a stigma attached to cancer. According to Algeo, that wasn't an unreasonable concern. Cleveland worried that news of his diagnosis would send Wall Street - and the country - into a panic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |