![]() “It was surprising to me that on this momentous day in American history, Roosevelt takes time in the middle of the day to have this treatment,” Gillon says. But the president’s official schedule shows that he regularly met with McIntire for sinus treatments – including a session lasting over an hour on 7 December 1941, after learning of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. We may never know for sure if Roosevelt was given cocaine, because his medical records went missing shortly after his death in 1945 – probably destroyed to cover up evidence that doctors knew how sick he was when running for a fourth term, Gillon says. (Even today, cocaine is a controlled substance that doctors can legally use in situations like sinus surgery.) “It was nothing unusual, it was common practice, and it wasn’t illegal,” Gillon says. Gillon consulted medical journals and spoke to top ENT doctors familiar with the profession’s history who agreed: “Cocaine was the drug of choice” for the procedure back then, making it likely that Roosevelt had received it. ![]() Roosevelt’s official physician was a respected ear, nose and throat doctor named Ross McIntire, who would use cotton swabs to clear the president’s sinuses, a process witnessed by the attorney general Francis Biddle, who described in his notes McIntire “swabbing out FDR’s nose”. ![]()
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