Master of His Fate James Tobin (free e books to read online .txt) 📖

Dr. Draper, on the other hand, respected what he called “the imponderables” in a patient’s recovery. He believed that disease was more complicated than simple infection by a germ; it was a “quarrel” between the germ and its human host, a relationship between “the seed and the soil,” as doctors of his school of thought put it. In that quarrel, Draper believed, the patient’s mind played its own mysterious role. Dr. Lovett, as an orthopedist, focused on the physical structures of bones and muscles. Dr. Draper considered everything that made up the life of a particular patient—not just the parts of his body that could be seen and touched but the traits he had inherited from his ancestors, his emotional and psychological makeup, the environment he lived in, and the complex interactions among all these factors. In the face of that complexity, who could say for sure that regular exposure to sunlight was not helping Franklin Roosevelt—if Roosevelt had developed a powerful belief that it did?

Nurse Lake could hardly believe her eyes. After his time in Florida, her patient now could “set” his right knee, meaning he could hold it firmly in the unbent position. This was a big advance toward the goal of walking by himself. And with only a bit of help, he could sit up from a lying-down position. Perhaps because of his rocking-chair exercises, he had gained power in his quadriceps, the packs of muscle in the front of the thighs. And he could move his feet better than he had before his trip.

“He came back immensely improved from his trip south,” Mrs. Lake told Dr. Lovett. He was “looking at least ten years younger.”

But then, even more quickly than he had improved, he declined again.

He was feeling so confident that he neglected his exercises, took on a pile of new projects, and stayed up late night after night. Within two weeks of his return, he caught a severe cold and “looked a perfect wreck,” according to Nurse Lake. She all but ordered him to Hyde Park for ten days of solid rest. But once he got there, she told Dr. Lovett, he “sat out in the damp” and steadily lost the power he had gained in his quadriceps. Soon he could no longer set his knee or move his feet as he had just a few weeks earlier.

In her private letters to Dr. Lovett, Nurse Lake blamed Eleanor for FDR’s setback. Mrs. Roosevelt was always urging Franklin to do this or that during the day, the nurse reported, and then bringing in guests for dinner. The guests would stay too late, FDR would get too little sleep, and the next day he would be exhausted. Mrs. Lake insisted that FDR could make progress only if he kept a single-minded focus on the proper care of his body.

But Eleanor had good reasons for inviting people to dinner so often. She knew her husband’s limbs needed exercise, but his brain needed exercise, too. She knew how he loved to keep up with news of what was happening inside the political parties, how he loved to discuss ideas for new policies and laws, how he savored gossip about politicians and friends.

She had never fully shared her husband’s confidence that he could learn to walk again and then run for office. (In October 1922, Dr. Draper had written to Dr. Lovett: “His wife told me on the side that she did not feel very sanguine [hopeful].”) Now, as the months passed, she was losing whatever hope she might have had.

But even if he never walked again, she believed he must stay active in the affairs of his state and his country.

“I want to keep him interested in politics,” she wrote to a friend. “This is what he cares for more than anything else. I don’t want him forgotten.”

Besides, it really wasn’t Eleanor who was distracting FDR from his exercises. He was distracting himself.

About this time he offered some advice to a friend who hoped to make his living as a writer. FDR sent his best wishes but said he doubted the friend could handle such a quiet and lonely life for long. “I can’t help feeling that you are built a bit like me,” he said, “that you need something physically more active, with constant contact with all sorts of people in many kinds of places.” As he told a reporter, “I have never specialized in any one thing. I am interested in too many things.”

It was true. When he was supposed to be concentrating on his workouts, he was giving his time to a dozen other pastimes, hobbies, and projects. Some were serious; others, pure fun. He had always been a busy man, but now his hunger to do things seemed insatiable, as if he could defy paralysis just by crowding his days and nights with activity.

For example:

He was a dedicated tree farmer. He directed the planting of thousands of seedlings on the Roosevelts’ lands around Hyde Park.

He invested in business ventures.

He designed and built big model sailboats for time trials on the Hudson River.

He made a study of the historic Dutch American farmhouses that lined the valley of the Hudson.

He continued to act as chairman of the regional Boy Scouts organization.

He sent Louis Howe to search shops in New York and Boston for valuable old stamps, books, and art prints, especially pictures of ships and boats. With magnifying glass and tweezers in hand, he sat for hours with his stamps, sorting and studying them for the tales they told of distant places and ages past. He thought everyone should collect stamps. Stamp collecting, he wrote, “dispels boredom, enlarges our vision, broadens our knowledge of geography and in innumerable ways enriches life and adds to its joy.”

He started to write a history of the United States. He dropped it after just fourteen pages. “But I had a real idea,” he told a friend later.