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According to The President is a Sick Man : Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth by Matthew Algeo, there are errors and omissions in the Cancer section.


 * There seems to be disagreement in the article over the number of doctors involved in the President's oral surgery. It says ". . .Cleveland and his surgeon, Dr. Joseph Bryant. . ." and then "The surgeons operated. . ." The second version corresponds to the above book; it states there were six doctors involved in the first surgery and five in the second. (See pages 231-233 for a summary of the main characters involved in the episodes.)


 * The article misunderstands the purpose of the second surgery, or perhaps the source utilized does. "During another surgery, Cleveland was fitted with a hard rubber dental prosthesis that corrected his speech and restored his appearance.[197]" This seems to strongly imply that the reason for the second surgery was to insert the prosthetic. There was no such thing as a dental implant in 1893. They had permanent bridges that were mounted to modified molars, but no implants. The second surgery was performed on July 17th after a new growth was noticed at the suture-line. More tissue was removed and the wound re-cauterized. This operation occurred again aboard the Oneida. (See page 116-117.)


 * Kasson Gibson, a prosthodonist, wasn't involved in the surgeries, but in the aftercare. He made casts of the President's mouth, which still exist and are pictured in the book, and fabricated a removable vulcanized-rubber prosthetic, which has been lost. The prosthetic plugged the large gap in Cleveland's maxilla and allowed him to speak and eat again and restored his face to a normal appearance. The President would wear it for hours at a time. It was thought that the prosthetic was fitted to the President sometime between July 7th and July 11th or so. (See pages 114-115.)


 * "Even when a newspaper story appeared giving details of the actual operation, the participating surgeons discounted the severity of what transpired during Cleveland's vacation.[197]" It was not only the doctors who discounted the severity of the President's condition (well, most of them), but also the President's staff and even Alexander McClure, the publisher of the Philadelphia Times and a close friend of Cleveland's. Dentist and anesthesiologist, Frederick Hasbrouck, who assisted in the first surgery, divulged the details to journalist E. J. Edwards. After the scoop appeared in print, the Presidential forces discredited Edwards, especially McClure, whose attacks in print against Edwards were particularly vicious. Since Cleveland was considered an honest man (bolstered by his handling of the Maria Halpin love affair), the public believed his version over that of Edwards. Because Bryant rightly suspected Hasbrouck of leaking the story of the surgery, he was not summoned for the second surgery and therefore didn't know it had occurred. (See the Liar chapter.) Not even Adlai Stevenson I, the Vice President, was allowed to know what happened to Cleveland. Page 54.


 * The article states: "In the 1980s, analysis of the specimen finally confirmed the tumor to be verrucous carcinoma,[202] a low-grade epithelial cancer with a low potential for metastasis.[192]" According to Algeo, this happened in 1975 after Cleveland's family finally gave permission while retaining a veto if the result was "questionable", meaning of syphilitic origin, as the original doctors had wondered from the tumor's appearance. Verrucous carcinoma is a rare form that metastasizes slowly or not at all. Since it wasn't discovered until 1948, one cannot blame Cleveland's medical team for not identifying it. However, they treated it exactly right. Left in situ, the tumor would eventually have caused great pain and would have prevented the President from eating and would have eventually suffocated him. The pathologists now believe that the oral VC did not lead to Cleveland's death, but that if he did die of cancer, that it must have been a separate gastrointestinal cancer altogether. (See pages 223-226.)

Algeo calls the whole episode "a brazen political cover-up that was as diabolical-and infinitely more successful than-Watergate." (Page ix.) This article skims over the importance and deep Constitutional implications of these events.

Thank you for your time and a successful 2015 to all, Wordreader (talk) 04:51, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

The diagnosis was not a malignant cancer, but instead an epithelioma.[215] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Grover_Cleveland/Archive_3#CANCER_section Rjensen Coemgenus