Originally posted by Bridewell
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Besides the victim of Jack, other sufferers from the disease included three U.S. politicians: Vice President (and then President) Chester Alan Arthur, Speaker of the House (and then Senator from Maine, Republican Presidential Candidate of 1884, and Secretary of State first for Garfield and then for Benjamin Harrison) James Gillespie Blaine, and Congressman from Utica, New York (and then Vice President under William Howard Taft) James Schoolcraft Sherman. All three were to die from the disease in 1886, 1893, and 1912 (a week before his second appearance on the ballot with Taft). In fact, Arthur knew he had the disease when he was Garfield's Vice President. Because he did, although he would have liked a term in office from the electorate of his own (and had sufficient popular support that with some effort he could have gotten the nomination rather than Blaine in 1884), Arthur did not make a real effort to get that nomination because he knew he would not survive his full term, and he did not want to put the nation through a second dying President situation after Garfield's prolonged martyrdom from July to September 1881. Arthur left office on March 4, 1885, and died in November 1886, which (after James Knox Polk's three months in 1849) was the second shortest post Presidential life span.
It is worth considering that if Jack did eat that diseased kidney without knowing it was bad for him, and was rushed to a hospital by relatives who did not know what caused his serious gastric problems, and while recovering he learned about the Bright's disease, in that month on his back he would have been festering increased hate towards prostitutes for trying to kill him that way, and when he got out in early November 1888 it might explain the eruption of purely evil violence done to Mary Jane Kelly's body.
Jeff
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