Did syphilis really cause John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Abraham Lincoln?
A Wayne State University professor believes the sexually-transmitted disease likely drove Booth to the edge.
"John Wilkes Booth and the Women Who Loved Him," is written by Ernest Abel, Ph.D., a dual-appointed professor in the School of Medicine's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences' Department of Psychology.
"With all the women in his life, including the many prostitutes he had affairs with, it was inevitable that he contracted syphilis," Dr. Abel said. "It's my explanation for his dramatic personality changes and what finally put him over the edge."
The book, released April 9, is available in hardcover ($22.47 on Amazon.com) and Kindle editions ($14.99).
Booth's name is likely to be included in the same breath as any mention of President Abraham Lincoln's April 14, 1865, assassination. But Booth wasn't always a killer.
Before he became an assassin, he was a celebrity on the American stage, with quite a reputation for womanizing -- from an actress who slit his throat and nearly killed him in a jealous rage to a prostitute who attempted suicide because he left her. There was even an actress who would swear she saw him murdering Lincoln, despite being thousands of miles away at the time of the shooting inside Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.
Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, was shot inside a burning barn 12 days after he shot President Lincoln. His pockets held a compass, a candle, a diary and five photographs of five women. The book, Dr. Abel said, is about them.
"What I found interesting was that when Booth died there were five photos in his pocket. One of them was a photo of his fiancé, a U.S. senator's daughter. The other four were photos of actresses -- which intrigued me because why would a man carry photos of other women if he were engaged?" he said.
It led him to ask whether Booth was really in love or just using his wealthy fiancé for her connections.
Dr. Abel initially explored how Booth's likely syphilis diagnosis played a role in the assassination of President Lincoln, in his 2015 book, "A Finger in Lincoln's Brain: What Modern Science Reveals about Lincoln, His Assassination and Its Aftermath."
Dr. Abel is also the author of 1982's "Marijuana: The First Twelve Thousand Years," a history of the cannabis plant and its relationship to mankind, and 2000's "Singing the New Nation: How Music Shaped the Confederacy," which explores the effect of music on confederate nationalism.
He writes more about his latest book here.