“The president has cancer.” It is 31 years since Steven Rosenberg, a member of the surgical team that removed a tumour from President Ronald Reagan’s colon, made that announcement to the world.
What I remember, from watching on television, is not only how calmly definitive Dr Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the US National Cancer Institute, was, but how clearly he described Reagan’s condition and its consequences. “There are many forms of cancer,” he said. As this one had not spread, the president’s chances of living a normal lifespan were “excellent”. Reagan lived another 19 years, dying in 2004 at the age of 93.
Harold Bornstein, Donald Trump’s doctor, has been less authoritative. In a four-paragraph letter, addressed “to whom my (sic) concern”, which he says he wrote in five minutes while a Trump team car waited outside, he described the Republican candidate’s health as “astonishingly excellent” and said that he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”.