"Unquestionably Superior"

"President Kennedy, a man who has suffered both illness and serious injury, enters the White House in the knowledge that his health is excellent and his medical future bright." Thus last week reported the American Medical Association magazine, Today's Health, in a detailed medical history of the incoming President.

Kennedy's 1960 chart shows a couple of colds, a touch of laryngitis and a short-lived bout with sinusitis. At 43, he is a trim, tanned 6 ft., although a recent gain of 10 Ibs. (to 175) showed in his plump cheeks. His blood pressure is a normal 112/80. But he has had a troubled medical past.

Rammed & Sunk. At 13, Jack Kennedy dropped out of Connecticut's Canterbury School with acute appendicitis. Recurring jaundice later forced his withdrawal from the London School of Economics and Princeton. Playing junior-varsity football at Harvard, he injured his spine, and in the Pacific, during World War II, he picked up malaria. When his PT boat was rammed and sunk by the Japanese destroyer Amagri, Kennedy was flung violently to the deck, and his old back injury was aggravated, causing spinal muscle spasms and sciatica.

A 1944 operation at Chelsea (Mass.) Naval Hospital relieved the spasms, but Kennedy then found that his left leg was a quarter-inch shorter than his right, and the resulting seesaw effect tended increasingly to bring the spasms back. By 1954 he was a cripple on crutches. He hobbled into New York's Hospital for Special Surgery. Doctors tried a delicate spinal fusion. It failed, and Kennedy contracted a near-fatal staphylococcus infection. Another operation four months later was successful, and novocain treatments broke the cycle of muscle spasms. The President still must wear a quarter-inch riser in the heel of his left shoes and sneakers, and a small brace to support his back muscles.

Campaign Issue. Even as his back pains troubled him early in the '50s, Kennedy was suffering from another disease that later became a campaign issue. Last July, aides of Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's chief rival for the nomination, charged that Senator Kennedy was a victim of Addison's disease. As described by Dr. Thomas Addison in 1849, that disease is a rare, acute adrenal tuberculosis (signs: extreme lethargy, deep skin pigmentation) that generally ends in death. Doctors nowadays often apply the name to nontubercular, nonfatal adrenal insufficiency. That, Kennedy's doctors say, is what he has, and until several years ago he took desoxycorticosterone and cortisone to make up the lack. He still takes other corticosteroids by mouth, although his last tests showed his adrenal function to be normal.

The doctors' latest report to Kennedy says: "Your health is excellent. Your vitality, endurance and resistance to infection are above average. Your ability to handle an exhausting work load is unquestionably superior."

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