The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7164 p330
8 September 2001

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Poisoned president
Great provoker
Mummies up to date

Poisoned president

Abraham Lincoln has been the subject of much comment respecting his anatomical abnormalities. Nevertheless, he ranks in the estimation of his expert critics as possessor of the best physical and mental health on record among United States presidents. Most discussion has gathered around Lincoln’s suffering from Marfan’s syndrome, or arachnodactyly, in which abnormally long and slender fingers are associated with excessive height and congenital defects of heart and eyes. Marfan’s syndrome rests on an inherited abnormality of connective tissue, but is not known to involve any neurological or psychiatric features.

Lincoln was well over six feet tall, with long thin arms and legs and slender hands, and he exhibited a squint of the left eye. In his earlier years, though apparently not later after he had been elected president, according to a commentary in Science for 27 July, he suffered some minor psychiatric disturbances. He was prone to mood swings, outbursts of rage, insomnia and forgetfulness. A New York retired physician and medical historian, Norbert Hirschhorn, has recently concluded that these manifestations are attributable to the consumption of the mercurial remedy, then known as “blue mass” to which Lincoln had recourse in an attempt to overcome depression. This remedy was prescribed for “hypochondria”, which it was believed to relieve by stimulating liver function. The future president started to take this remedy in 1841, when he was aged 32.

Hirschhorn and his colleagues made “blue mass” according to an old recipe, by triturating together mercury, liquorice root, rosewater, honey, sugar and rose petals. They calculated that Lincoln probably consumed some 9,000 times the safe total of mercury. Having done so, he is recorded as having complained of feeling “cross”. However, shortly after he was elected president, he discontinued his mercurial treatment, whereupon he experienced some behavioural problems. There is no evidence that he showed any serious health problems until his violent end in April 1865.

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Great provoker

Although much hot air is expended on the subject of the prevalence of drug habits in the mores of modern society, little of it is taken seriously, largely because the problem is well-nigh beyond solution. Youngsters growing up today are faced with a bewildering variety of compounds that can produce initially pleasant effects when consumed, despite their grave menace in the longer view. Measures taken to restrict access to substances of habituation and true addiction are countered by the greed of those pushing them and the stupidity of those offered access to them. Governments are hypocritical in their attitude to substances that provide tax revenue and bow to the huge corporations that manufacture them.

We like to draw a distinction between substances which generations have used as “relaxational adjuncts”, notably alcohol and tobacco, and newer substances (and more potent and dangerous ones) such as amphetamine derivatives, which also serve to fling wide the doors of perception and lead to a treacherous land of make-believe. We permit the first, subject to payment of tax, and forbid the others, which we lump together under the interdict of “drugs”. Yet they are all substances of abuse, and we should forego any attempt to make an impermeable barrier between them.

An editorial in The Lancet for 4 August underlines the particular menace of ethanol for children who are exposed to its blandishments. It observes that “while sexual activity among the young — especially if they are of the same sex — can cause waves of moral panic in certain countries, reports of children drinking alcohol in substantial quantities seem to register only a flicker of interest by comparison”. Yet alcohol is responsible for a weighty burden of morbidity and mortality across all age groups. Drinking in Europe tends to be heavier than elsewhere, so that the impact on public health is higher. In Eastern Europe there is a worsening situation. The director-general of the World Health Organization reports alarming signs of deteriorating drinking habits among young people. “Binge drinking”, an undefined term, among the young is increasing worldwide, in developing as well as developed countries. In the United Kingdom, average weekly consumption of alcohol among regularly drinking schoolchildren has increased from 5.3 units in 1990 to 10.4 units in 2000.

The use of alcohol by children and teenagers shows an association with family and school problems, and has been linked with depression and anxiety disorders. There is some evidence, observes ? The Lancet, that childhood drinking of alcohol may result in liver injury. And, so far, the potential long-term evil effects on the developing brain and endocrine system of youngsters is not well understood. Meanwhile, the drinks industry flourishes and exerts its influence on governments. The health care profession has given only low priority to alcohol-related illnesses hitherto. “Is it not time to give this problem some serious consideration?”

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Mummies up to date

When police in Pakistan seized an ornately carved mummy coffin offered to art dealers for $11m last October, they made a strange discovery, described by Robert Koenig in Science for 29 June. The golden plaque on the coffin was inscribed in Old Persian cuneiform to the effect that inside was the mummy of a daughter of King Xerxes, some 2,600 years old.

However, analysis has shown that the mummy is a fake, and that the body is that of a woman either recently murdered or snatched from a grave shortly after death. Radiocarbon dating of muscle, skin and bone from the mummy is being undertaken. There are no teeth and no tongue in the body, which is wrapped in bandages that are so hard and thickened that an electric drill was necessary to penetrate them. The back of the corpse was broken and the mouth and stomach full of a powder, which is being analysed. The cuneiform inscription was found to be faulty, and the body had not been properly desiccated before wrapping.

Apparently, legal action was being undertaken earlier on the part of the Iranian cultural heritage authorities to seize the mummy in question on the ground that it was suspected to be that of an ancient member of the Persian royal family smuggled into Pakistan from Iran. The casket inscription was pronounced by an expert to be partly taken from an inscription of King Darius from the famous site at Behistun, dating from 520BC. Recent scanning studies and other analyses have suggested that the body involved is that of a woman older than 50, suffering from osteoporosis, who probably died within the past five or six years. The cloth used to wrap it is estimated to be not more than 40 years old, since it has revealed radioisotopes derived from nuclear tests performed between 1958 and 1960 or between 1992 and 1994.

The incident is incredibly complicated, by all accounts, and it is suggested it should warn archaeologists to beware of faked mummies and their cases, however convincing they may be on the surface.

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