I once dated a woman who said that people get the diseases that somehow are a reflection of their personality, or their lives. I hated this idea. Lung cancer from smoking is one thing, but does anyone deserve MS? I thought of that comment when I saw this. Abraham Lincoln had double vision. Of course.

The left side of Lincoln’s face was much smaller than the right, an aberration called cranial facial microsomia. The defect joins a long list of ailments — including smallpox, heart illness and depression — that modern doctors have diagnosed in Lincoln.
Lincoln’s contemporaries noted his left eye at times drifted upward independently of his right eye, a condition now termed strabismus. Lincoln’s smaller left eye socket may have displaced a muscle controlling vertical movement, said Dr. Ronald Fishman, who led the study published in the August issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology.
Severe strabismus leads to double vision and can be treated today by surgery.
”Lincoln noticed double vision only occasionally and it did not bother him a great deal,” said Fishman, a retired ophthalmologist and history buff.
Most people’s faces are asymmetrical, Fishman said, but Lincoln’s case was extreme, with the bony ridge over his left eye rounder and thinner than the right side, and set backward.