The public may have a right to know about their president’s health, but a president’s physicians are beholden only to their patient, not to the American people. Historical examples suggest that Americans have had reason to be skeptical of what a president’s physician reported, especially when the news seemed to be suspiciously positive or selectively vague.
In the summer of 1893, Grover Cleveland was obviously not well. He had gone to Gray Gables, his summer home on Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts, in early July, ostensibly for a vacation. But he’d barely left the house, even to sit on the porch.
Rumors began to spread that Cleveland was suffering from cancer—specifically oral cancer, a disease similar to the one that had killed Ulysses S. Grant eight years earlier. On the evening of July 6, a reporter for United Press managed to corner Cleveland’s personal physician, Joseph Bryant, on the porch of Gray Gables.
“From what is he suffering?” the unidentified reporter asked.
“He is suffering from rheumatism, just as it was reported this afternoon,” Bryant answered. “Those reports were correct.”
“Then, doctor, the report that he is suffering from a malignant or cancerous growth in the mouth and that an operation was necessary and had been performed to relieve it is not correct.”
“He is suffering from the teeth,” Bryant said. “That is all.”
Bryant was the president of the New York Academy of Medicine and would later serve as the president of the American Medical Association. His credentials were unimpeachable.
And so the next day, the papers dutifully reported that Cleveland was suffering from nothing worse than a toothache, and the nation was reassured.
But Bryant had lied. Cleveland was in fact very ill.
In late June, Bryant had examined a lesion on the roof of Cleveland’s mouth and declared it a “bad-looking tenant.” The doctor recommended it be removed immediately. But Cleveland didn’t want the public to know he was ill, so the operation was performed on a yacht owned by one of the president’s friends.
In a 90-minute operation, a hastily assembled surgical team, sworn to secrecy, removed the tumor, along with five teeth and much of Cleveland’s upper-left palate and jawbone. The procedure took place entirely within the patient’s mouth, so that no external scars would betray the operation.
Cleveland eventually recovered, and the truth would not be known until long after he died, in 1908.