Research Note/Issues in Wilson Scholarship: References to Early “Strokes” in the Papers of Woodrow Wilson

Any evaluation of Woodrow Wilson's neurological status prior to his severe stroke in the fall of 1919 is necessarily speculative. The patient is not available for examination, many of his medical records are missing, and some of the records most critical to diagnosis are known to have been destroyed. The published memoirs and the unpublished diary of Cary T. Grayson, Wilson's physician from the time he entered the White House until his death in 1924, are helpful, but the data are largely anecdotal and say little about Wilson's health prior to 1912. Surviving letters and other documents containing Wilson's own frequent references to his health and other people's observations about it are suggestive but not conclusive. ' Why, then, should three nonhistorians trouble historians with an article on