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Study: Lincoln may have had facial defect

(AP)
Updated: 2007-08-14 09:24

CHICAGO -- Artists, sculptors and photographers knew Abraham Lincoln's
face had a good side. Now it's confirmed by science.

President Abraham Lincoln poses for a portrait in this undated file photo.

Laser scans of two life masks, made from plaster casts of Lincoln's face,
reveal the 16th president's unusual degree of facial asymmetry, according
to a new study.

The left side of Lincoln's face was much smaller than the right, an
aberration called cranial facial microsomia. The defect joins a long list
of ailments - including smallpox, heart illness and depression - that
modern doctors have diagnosed in Lincoln.

Lincoln's contemporaries noted his left eye at times drifted upward
independently of his right eye, a condition now termed strabismus.
Lincoln's smaller left eye socket may have displaced a muscle controlling
vertical movement, said Dr. Ronald Fishman, who led the study published
in the August issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology.

Severe strabismus leads to double vision and can be treated today by
surgery.

"Lincoln noticed double vision only occasionally and it did not bother
him a great deal," said Fishman, a retired Washington, D.C.,
ophthalmologist and history buff.

Most people's faces are asymmetrical, Fishman said, but Lincoln's case
was extreme, with the bony ridge over his left eye rounder and thinner
than the right side, and set backward.

Lincoln's appearance was mocked by his political enemies, historians say.
The author Nathaniel Hawthorne, a Lincoln fan, wrote of the president's
"homely sagacity" and his "sallow, queer, sagacious visage." Hawthorne's
description was deemed disrespectful and deleted by a magazine editor,
said Daniel Weinberg, owner of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago.

Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum described the left side of
Lincoln's face as primitive, immature and unfinished.

When Lincoln was a boy, he was kicked in the head by a horse. Laser scans
can't settle whether the kick or a developmental defect - or neither -
contributed to Lincoln's lopsided face, Fishman said.

The scanning technique is usually used to create 3-D images of children
with cleft lip and palate before and after surgery. Fishman teamed up
with Dr. Adriana Da Silveira, an Austin, Texas, orthodontist who
specializes in children with facial defects, to scan a bronze and a
plaster copy of two life masks, owned by the Chicago History Museum.

Life masks were in vogue in the 1860s, said James Cornelius, curator at
the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill.

Lincoln cooperated with sculptors to make them twice, in 1860 before his
first presidential nomination, and in 1865, two months before his
assassination. Lincoln probably did it for political purposes more than
posterity, Cornelius said.

"It's the equivalent of TV face time now," Cornelius said.

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