Is there a chance that we could induct the Great One — Abraham Lincoln himself — into the “Brotherhood of the Beast”, posthumously?
I guess it’s obvious that I have been trying to come up with something original to write about for Presidents Day. But I found it pretty darn hard to answer my own question, considering that nothing has ever been written about Lincoln’s prostate, if a Google search is any indication. Actually, the whole idea of Lincoln even having a prostate sounds funny to me. It’s like dear husband said a few years ago, “Didn’t PC start showing up like in the last 20 years or so? Never heard of it before.”
Some historians speculate that President Lincoln did indeed have an undiagnosed illness toward the end of his life that was sapping his overall health. One theory is that it was cancer.
Can we make a case that it might have been prostate cancer? I almost don’t know where to begin to speculate. So let’s start with Lincoln’s diet. The president was known to eat lots of fruits and nuts. Nuts, especially walnuts, are supposed to be protective against PC. But then, Mr. Lincoln, being a man of his time, also drank lots of milk, and some people think too much calcium is a risk factor.
Pres. Lincoln was a teetotaller, and you would think abstention would have had an overall protective effect on his health, cancer included. But no, just the other day I read that (moderate) alcohol consumption was shown not to be associated with an increased risk of PC. But you can also make the case that the lack of alcohol in Mr. Lincoln’s diet (especially red wine) deprived him of reservatrol, a neutriprotectant that is associated with lots of goodies, including a reduced incidence of prostate cancer.
Then there are the apostles of Vitamin D (self included), whose credo is that high levels of it in the bloodstream protect against prostate cancer. Ideally that would involve a man working in the open air where he could get lots of sunlight. You have to be outdoors to split rails (and Kentucky’s pretty sunny), so I would give the former president a check for that. Also, Lincoln spent