The Time a Gross Hotel Made Our 15th President Vomit Blood Before His Inauguration

Markdown with headings and short paragraphs

So This Happened...

Okay, let me tell you about one of the most disgusting presidential stories you've probably never heard.

Picture this: It's early 1857. James Buchanan just won the election and is getting ready to become America's 15th president. He's staying at the National Hotel in Washington D.C.—the fanciest spot in town, the place where Southern aristocrats loved to party. Everyone's excited, the country is humming along, and Buchanan should be feeling pretty good about himself.

Except he's not. Because he's currently vomiting blood in his hotel room.

And he's definitely not alone.

A Mysterious Sickness Sweeps Through the "Finest" Hotel in Town

Here's what makes this story so wild. Weeks before the inauguration, Buchanan and his crew first arrived at the National Hotel and... everyone got sick. Like, really sick. We're talking violent vomiting, bloody symptoms, the whole horrible package.

But then it seemed to calm down. People recovered, life went on, and everyone figured it was just some bad batch of food or maybe a weird flu going around.

Wrong.

When Buchanan and hundreds of supporters returned in early March for the inauguration festivities, the sickness came back with a vengeance. And this time, it was even worse.

The Most Opulent Hotel in America Becomes a Plague House

Here's where things get really fascinating—and by fascinating, I mean absolutely horrifying.

The winter of 1857 had been particularly brutal. And beneath the National Hotel's beautiful facade, things were quietly falling apart. I'm talking about the gross stuff nobody wanted to think about: cracked pipes, rats everywhere, and cesspools stagnating under the foundations.

Some guests noticed a suspicious smell snaking through the hallways. But being refined 19th-century folks, they probably just held their perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses and thought "well, winter is ending, things are thawing, this is probably normal."

Oh, how wrong they were.

When that frozen sludge finally thawed, something emerged from the accumulated mess of waste, dead pests, and god-knows-what-else. And suddenly, the most prestigious hotel in Washington turned into a nightmare.

Buchanan Nearly Died (And His "Adopted Son" Did)

The sickness didn't care about social status. From high-society elites to servants working in the basement, everyone was getting hit with violent expulsions that would make you never want to eat again.

Buchanan himself was so cramped up that he was doubled over, gasping for air. His nephew and personal secretary, Elliot Eskridge Lane (who Buchanan reportedly thought of as the son he never had), was among the worst cases.

When the new president finally stood up to give his inauguration address the next morning, witnesses said all the color had drained from his face. He looked like a husk of the man he should have been.

Lane died. So did nearly three dozen other people. Hundreds more were affected.

Doctors Had No Idea What They Were Dealing With

This is one of my favorite parts of the story, because it shows just how far we've come in understanding disease.

The doctors who rushed to help had basically no clue what was happening. Some thought it was typhoid. Others guessed at different forms of gastroenteritis. A few old-school physicians prescribed calomel—a mercury chloride compound that was supposed to "purge" bad humors by making you vomit even more.

Unsurprisingly, this treatment often made things worse and sometimes hastened death. Yikes.

The popular theory at the time was "miasma"—the idea that "bad air" caused disease. This was, of course, wrong, but honestly? It wasn't entirely off-base in a weird way. The miasma theorists at least understood that something was in the environment making people sick. They just had no idea about the actual mechanism (germs, bacteria, and parasites hiding in that thawing sludge).

Conspiracy Theories Immediately Sprouted Up

Because of course they did.

Without a clear diagnosis, newspapers started calling it the "National Hotel Disease." People were so scared they would cross the street just to avoid walking past the building.

And then came the wild theories. Some people actually suggested it was an assassination attempt—and blamed free Black Americans (who none of them had worked in the hotel's kitchen, but facts weren't really a priority here). This theory fell apart when people realized Buchanan's VP, John C. Breckenridge, was equally sympathetic to Southern interests, so taking out Buchanan would accomplish nothing for abolitionists.

Other folks wondered if it was poison—specifically arsenic, which was easy to get since it was commonly used in rat poison. The symptoms did look similar to arsenic poisoning, and both living patients and autopsies showed disturbing parallels.

But here's the thing: we'll never really know for certain what caused the National Hotel Disease. The evidence is incomplete, and historians and scientists have been debating it ever since.

What This Story Tells Us

I love this story because it gives us such a window into the past.

In 1857, medicine was still fumbling in the dark. Scientists were about a decade away from Louis Pasteur's germ theory breakthrough. Cities were absolutely disgusting by modern standards—plumbing was rudimentary, sanitation was an afterthought, and the idea that invisible organisms could make you sick seemed ridiculous.

The National Hotel wasn't even uniquely filthy by the standards of its day. It just happened to be the site of a perfect storm: a harsh winter, aging infrastructure, and the arrival of hundreds of out-of-town guests with no immunity to whatever was lurking there.

America was also on the brink of something terrible. The country would explode into civil war just a few years later, and Buchanan—who was a northerner with deeply Southern sympathies—would go down as one of the most ineffective presidents in history.

But on that March morning in 1857, the biggest crisis he faced was making it through his inauguration speech without passing out from the aftereffects of whatever had taken over his hotel.

It's a gross, fascinating, and genuinely spooky piece of American history that deserves to be more widely known. And honestly? It makes me appreciate modern plumbing and germ theory just a little bit more.