Did Wilson's Health Change History?

In a letter of 1911 to his special lady friend, Mary Peck, Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) confessed that in his childhood he had “lived a dream life (almost too exclusively, perhaps).” Both his father and his mother had helped to enrich that life by regularly reading aloud to him from the works of Charles Dickens and Walter Scott, the collected essays of Charles Lamb, and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather­stocking Tales. The boy adored those books, yet he was unable to identify all the letters of the alphabet until he was nine years old, and he was 12 before he learned to read. Aside from buying him a pair of eyeglasses, which proved to be unnecessary, the senior Wilsons could think of no way to help their son—and no wonder. During the years of mounting concern about their son’s laggard literacy, they lived in a quiet southern town far removed from the nation’s centers of medical activity. They did not know that pioneer observers had recently discerned a surprising pattern: In certain cases of stroke, the victim was unable to read but retained the ability to talk.