A President Incapacitated: Woodrow Wilson's Stroke
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2020
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
101 years ago this week, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a serious stroke which left him prone to "disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, and defective judgment." As President Trump confronts his own health crisis, I talked to John Milton Cooper, Jr., Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about President Wilson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. |
| 0:02.8 | The eyes of the world are on Donald Trump's medical team. |
| 0:07.8 | We want updates, we're furious when we don't get X-rays, scans, detailed breakdowns of |
| 0:13.6 | minute-to-minute treatment. |
| 0:15.5 | This is something of a new phenomenon in US political history. |
| 0:18.9 | There have been many presidents in the past with serious health concerns that have been |
| 0:22.9 | hidden from the population. |
| 0:25.3 | In this episode of podcast, I talked to John Milton Cooper, professor of history at the |
| 0:29.1 | University of Wisconsin. |
| 0:30.1 | He is the world's greatest living authority on Woodrow Wilson. |
| 0:34.3 | It gave me a chance to talk about Wilson's stroke, which was hidden from the American people, |
| 0:39.9 | left him in many ways incapacitated. |
| 0:42.2 | And also talked about Wilson's handling of the last great global pandemic, the influenza |
| 0:49.0 | of 1918 to 1919, as well as other things like Wilson's racial justice, progressive agenda, |
| 0:56.4 | and attitude towards governing. |
| 0:58.3 | It's a long overdue look at one of the most consequential presidents in US history. |
| 1:04.9 | If you want to watch history documentaries, US history for example, you can get a history |
| 1:09.3 | hit TV. |
| 1:10.3 | I've started a new history challenge, like Netflix for history. |
| 1:13.9 | It's got all the back episodes, this podcast, many other podcasts, lots of audio, but also |
| 1:18.0 | hundreds of hours of history documentaries on there as well. |
| 1:21.3 | And if you use the code pod1pod1, you get a month for free and your second month for |
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