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Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
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Robert E. Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins (1948) deals primarily with the wartime service of Harry L. Hopkins, essentially covering Hopkins's health problems as Sherwood knew of them from close association. Two existing biographies, by Henry H. Adams and George McJimsey, are extremely skimpy in dealing with Hopkins's death, as if it were inevitable about the time that it occurred. |
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Sherwood wrote that Hopkins died of "hemochromatosis, the result of his inadequate digestive equipment." Peter Gott, M.D., practicing physician and newspaper columnist, in a recent column defined hemochromatosis, "iron overload, an inherited disorder of iron metabolism." Note "inherited." What someone dies of is what caused the heart to stop beating on the day of death. It is my conviction that Hopkins died really of malnutrition, with simulated hemochromatosis applying the coup de grâce on January 29, 1946. |
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Hopkins's health problems centered around stomach cancer, successfully dealt with by surgery in 1936 to remove most of his stomach. Shortly before he died, he believed that he had cirrhosis of the liver. Sherwood wrote that "The post-mortem revealed no cirrhosis of the liver, and no cancer." |
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To accept that removal of most of the stomach would make health delicate is one thing. To accept that this resulted in absorption of too much iron from healthful foods—if he experienced healthful foods—is something else. Hopkins lived to be fifty-six, and he most definitely was not treated for actual, or simulated, hemochromatosis. |
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Sherwood reported that when Hopkins "returned to the White House from hospital" in January 1942, he had a "regimen" that encompassed seven medications, or, put less charitably, home remedies. One of these was "liver extract (Lederle)—5 cc intramuscularly every other day for two weeks." |
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Hopkins often overworked, to exhaustion, during World War II, traveling as Franklin D. Roosevelt's personal emissary, while enduring deprivations of comfort on all sides, food, sleep, and warmth. Back home in the White House, he apparently had as his primary care physician the same man as FDR, Ross T. McIntire, the man who failed to admit to anyone that FDR had arteriosclerosis—charlatan or bumbler, take one's pick. Hopkins should have been under the care of a nutritionist. Frances Perkins depicted FDR as having a good appetite. He did not complain about the poor food that Henrietta Nesbitt sent up from the White House kitchen, whereas almost every guest found it dreadful and said so in memoirs. Permanent house guest Hopkins was not in a position to complain, with home remedies already killing his appetite. To the direct point, you do not feed liver extract to a patient suffering from excess iron in his blood. Liver extract is for anemia. |
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FDR died all worn out in 1945. In 1946 the head of Harry Hopkins was unimpaired, the vigorous heart of Harry Hopkins was unimpaired. If he died twenty years too soon, because of sheer medical incompetence, that was a tragic loss. |
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| Gilbert S. Bahn, Ph.D.
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| Moorpark, California |
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