Study: Abe Lincoln’s Anti-Depressant Made Him Mad.

‘A few months into

his presidency, Abraham Lincoln stopped

taking the little blue pills used to treat his

melancholia because they made him

“cross,” and scientists said on Tuesday it

was good that he did.

Those pills contained enough mercury to

kill him, said retired physician and

medical historian Norbert Hirschhorn,

who authored a study on the subject.

“If Lincoln hadn’t recognized that the little blue pill he took made

him ‘cross,’ and stopped the medication, his steady hand at the helm

through the Civil War might have been considerably less steady,” he

wrote in the summer issue of the journal Perspectives in Biology and

Medicine.’ [thanks, Abby]

Recall that to be ‘mad as a hatter’ refers to mercury and arsenic poisoning as well, which hatters contracted because of the pesticides used to prevent insect damage in the wool and cotton they handled. Interestingly, a Google search on (arsenic AND “mad hatter”) comes up with as many hits about Arsenic and Old Lace as it does to environmental toxicology; it seems my favorite screwball comedy is often mentioned in the same breath as the “mad hatter”. Recall, also, that concerns about arsenic poisoning are back in the news because, as I’ve previously blinked, chromated copper arsenate leaches into playground soil from the pressure-treated lumber used to build kids’ climbing structures.

I’m treating a man with a psychiatric disturbance and arachnodactyly (Marfan’s Syndrome) right now (although, of course, not with mercurics!); Lincoln had Marfan’s. I could only find eleven citations in the medical literature discussing the question of whether there is an association between Marfan’s syndrome and mental health symptoms. (Because Marfan’s is associated with cardiac anomalies, there may sometimes be CNS insults due to circulatory problems that might be mistaken for a primary psychiatric problem.)