President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s health problems have been so well chronicled that even those with a great interest in the topic might have thought there wasn’t much more to say about it.
Then, along came neurologist Steven Lomazow and journalist Eric Fettmann. “FDR’s Deadly Secret,’’ which is likely to trigger much discussion among physicians and historians, contends that in addition to all his other maladies, Roosevelt suffered from melanoma. They argue that it was cancer that killed him on April 12, 1945, less than three months after he began his fourth term.
According to Lomazow and Fettmann the melanoma started with a lesion above FDR’s left eye and eventually spread to his brain and abdomen. The authors’ diagnosis comes on top of what historians have always acknowledged about FDR’s health: his heart disease, fluctuating blood pressure, and the effects of polio. While some of their evidence is circumstantial, the authors also make use of newly discovered correspondence and some medical records that hadn’t previously received much attention.
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