NPR - A Yacht, A Mustache: How A President Hid His Tumor
July 6, 2011
12:01 AM ET
/snip/
So Cleveland decided to have the tumor secretly removed. The plan was for the president to announce he was taking a friend's yacht, the Oneida, on a four-day fishing trip from New York to his summer home in Cape Cod.
"And it was on that yacht that this operation was performed," Algeo says. "They assembled a team of six surgeons. [It] took about 90 minutes. They used ether as the anesthesia and they removed the tumor along with about five teeth and a large part of the president's upper left jawbone."
The surgeons managed to extract the tumor through the president's mouth, which meant there was no noticeable scarring and the president's trademark mustache was left untouched — key conditions for keeping the public in the dark.
Algeo says the operation was an extraordinary achievement in American medicine.
"The doctors took incredible risks. I mean, it was really foolhardy," Algeo says. "I talked to a couple of oral surgeons [while] researching the book, and they still marvel at this operation: that they were able to do this on a moving boat; [that] they did it very quickly. A similar operation today would take several hours; they did it in 90 minutes."
/snip
= new reply since forum marked as read