“We are happy to announce that the health of the president is decidedly better, the disease with which he was afflicted having assumed a more favorable aspect,” a Washington newspaper reported.
The president was William Henry Harrison, who had been sworn in on March 4, 1841. On the day the news article was published, April 1, 1841, Harrison actually was fighting for his life.
Just as reports on President Trump’s condition and treatment for the coronavirus were incomplete and contradictory before his release Monday from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, so were the reports on Harrison’s illness.
