The President Who Couldn't Stop Throwing Up

A inauguration Gone Wrong

Let me share something that'll make you grateful for modern plumbing and basic medical knowledge.

It's early 1857. James Buchanan just crushed the election and is gearing up to become America's 15th president. He's checking into the National Hotel in Washington D.C.—the most prestigious address in the capital, where Southern elites came to wine, dine, and scheme.

The guy should be on top of the world.

Instead, he's hemorrhaging from both ends in his hotel room.

And here's the kicker—he's not the only one.

Something Rotten in the Capital

Here's what makes this story absolutely wild. When Buchanan and his entourage first checked into the National Hotel weeks before the big day, chaos ensued. Guests were hit with violent gastrointestinal explosions that would make a food poisoning veteran weep.

Then, mysteriously, everyone got better. People shrugged it off. "Must've been bad oysters," they probably said. Life continued. Parties resumed.

But when Buchanan and hundreds of supporters flooded back in early March for inauguration week, the nightmare returned—and it came back angrier.

The Fancy Hotel From Hell

This is where it gets genuinely horrifying.

The winter of 1857 had been brutal. And behind the National Hotel's gleaming facade, things were quietly decomposing. We're talking about burst pipes, vermin running wild, and cesspools turning into bacterial breeding grounds beneath the foundation.

Some guests caught a whiff of something nasty drifting through the hallways. But these were refined 1850s folks who simply raised their perfumed handkerchiefs and thought, "Well, spring is coming. Frozen things are melting. Totally normal."

They couldn't have been more wrong.

When all that frozen filth finally warmed up, it unleashed something from the delightful cocktail of human waste, dead rodents, and heaven-knows-what-else. America's most prestigious hotel instantly became a scene from a nightmare.

The Death Toll Nobody Talks About

This plague didn't care about your social standing. Upper-crust aristocrats, servants scrubbing floors in the basement—everyone was getting absolutely wrecked by violent expulsions that permanently ruined anyone's appetite.

Buchanan himself was in such bad shape that he could barely breathe. His nephew and personal secretary, Elliot Eskridge Lane—the kid Buchanan treated like the son he never had—was among the worst affected.

When the newly-minted president finally dragged himself to deliver his inauguration address the next morning, onlookers noted that all the life had drained from his face. He looked like a corpse who'd somehow learned to walk.

Lane didn't make it. Neither did roughly 35 other people. Hundreds more were sickened.

When Doctors Were Basically Useless

Here's the part that really puts things in perspective.

The physicians who rushed to help had zero idea what they were dealing with. Some guessed typhoid. Others threw around terms like gastroenteritis. A few old-school doctors went full medieval and prescribed calomel—a mercury compound meant to "purge" your system by inducing even more vomiting.

This approach, shockingly, frequently made patients worse. Sometimes it killed them faster.

The prevailing wisdom was "miasma"—the belief that toxic air caused illness. While completely wrong, these folks were at least onto something. They recognized that the environment itself was making people sick. They just had no concept of the actual culprit: germs, bacteria, and parasites multiplying in that thawing nightmare underneath the building.

Conspiracy Theories Exploded

Because what would a mysterious outbreak be without ridiculous speculation?

With no clear diagnosis, newspapers dubbed it the "National Hotel Disease." Terrified locals crossed the street just to avoid walking past the place.

The conspiracies got wild fast. Some claimed it was an assassination attempt—pointing fingers at free Black Americans, despite none of them working anywhere near the hotel kitchen. (Accuracy wasn't exactly their strong suit.) That theory collapsed once people realized Buchanan's VP, John C. Breckenridge, held equally pro-Southern views, meaning killing Buchanan would've accomplished absolutely nothing for abolitionists.

Others theorized about arsenic poisoning—plausible, since rat poison containing arsenic was everywhere. The symptoms did match, and both living victims and autopsies showed troubling similarities.

But here's the honest truth: we'll never know for certain what caused the National Hotel Disease. The evidence is too spotty. Historians and scientists have been arguing about it for over a century and a half.

What This Reveals About 1857

This story is a time machine.

In 1857, medicine was basically fumbling around in total darkness. Scientists were roughly a decade away from Pasteur's germ theory revolution. American cities were disgusting by any modern standard—plumbing was primitive, sanitation was an afterthought, and the notion that invisible organisms could devastate your body seemed absurd.

The National Hotel wasn't even exceptionally filthy for its era. It just happened to experience a perfect storm: a brutal winter, crumbling infrastructure, and hundreds of out-of-town visitors with zero resistance to whatever was lurking in that building.

America itself was sitting on a powder keg. Civil war was four years away, and Buchanan—a Northern man with Southern sympathies—would go down in history as one of the nation's most useless presidents.

But on that March morning in 1857, his biggest concern was delivering his inauguration speech without collapsing from whatever biological warfare was happening inside his hotel.

It's a grotesque, captivating, and genuinely unsettling chapter of American history that deserves way more attention than it gets. And honestly? It makes modern medicine and sewage systems feel like genuine miracles.