Eleanor Roosevelt lived a life that redefined what it meant to be a First Lady. She was a powerhouse. She was everywhere—from coal mines in West Virginia to the halls of the United Nations. But by the time the early 1960s rolled around, that legendary stamina was finally hitting a wall. People often think she just faded away from old age, but the truth about how did eleanor roosevelt die is actually a medical mystery that baffled the best doctors in New York City for months.
It wasn't a quick or quiet exit. It was a messy, painful, and honestly quite confusing battle against a disease that most people thought was a relic of the past.
The Mystery of the Failing Bone Marrow
In 1960, Eleanor was 75. She started feeling incredibly tired. Now, for Eleanor Roosevelt, "tired" meant she could only work 12 hours a day instead of 16. She told her personal doctor, David Gurewitsch, that she was "too busy to be sick." Classic Eleanor. But her body wasn't listening.
Her blood work was a mess. Doctors diagnosed her with aplastic anemia. Basically, her bone marrow—the factory that makes your blood—had just stopped working. She wasn't making enough red blood cells, which left her pale and exhausted. To keep her going, they started giving her blood transfusions.
But here’s where it gets weird.
Every time she got a transfusion, she’d have a violent reaction. Chills. Fevers hitting 105 degrees. It was brutal. By 1962, things were looking grim. Her doctors, desperate to kickstart her bone marrow, put her on high doses of prednisone.
The Deadly Trade-Off
Prednisone is a powerful steroid. In 1962, it was kind of a miracle drug, but it had a dark side. It nukes your immune system. While they were trying to fix her blood, they were accidentally opening the door for an old enemy to walk right back into her life.
You see, back in 1919, Eleanor had a bad bout of "pleurisy." Most historians and medical experts, like Dr. Barron Lerner, believe this was actually a primary tuberculosis (TB) infection that her body had successfully walled off for forty years. It was dormant. Just sitting there.
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When the doctors gave her those steroids for the anemia, they essentially took the "guards" off that walled-off infection. The TB didn't just come back; it exploded. It turned into miliary tuberculosis. That’s a terrifying version of the disease where the bacteria hitch a ride in the bloodstream and spread to every organ—the liver, the spleen, the kidneys, and even back into the bone marrow itself.
Why the Doctors Missed It
People often ask: if she had TB, why didn't the doctors just give her antibiotics?
Well, they tried. But they were flying blind. In the 60s, a TB culture took about six weeks to grow in a lab. Six weeks! By the time the lab confirmed she had active tuberculosis, Eleanor was already slipping away.
There’s also a bit of a medical "VIP syndrome" that happened here. Because she was the Eleanor Roosevelt, her doctors were hesitant to keep her in the hospital when she begged to go home. She hated the "articles of torture," as she called the medical tests. She wanted to die in her own bed at her apartment on East 74th Street.
She eventually got her wish. On October 18, 1962, she checked herself out of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center against medical advice.
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The Final Days
By November, she was barely conscious. She had suffered what appeared to be a stroke. Her breathing was labored. On the evening of November 7, 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt passed away. She was 78 years old.
Even at the very end, there was drama. Her doctors tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and even injected adrenaline directly into her heart. It was a frantic, desperate attempt to save a woman who had already made it very clear she was ready to go.
Later, an autopsy confirmed the truth. It wasn't just the anemia. It was the disseminated tuberculosis. To make matters worse, posthumous testing showed that the specific strain of TB she had was resistant to the two main drugs they had tried to use (streptomycin and isoniazid). She had a drug-resistant super-infection before that was even a common term.
What We Can Learn from Eleanor’s Death
Eleanor Roosevelt’s death changed how we think about end-of-life care and the risks of immunosuppression.
- Listen to the patient: Eleanor knew she was dying long before the doctors admitted it. Her insistence on going home was a final act of autonomy.
- The danger of steroids: While necessary for many conditions, the "steroid-induced reactivation" of old infections is a risk doctors are much more careful about today.
- Medical ethics: Her case is still studied in medical schools (like at the University of Maryland’s Historical CPC) to discuss whether "doing everything" is always the right choice.
If you’re interested in the history of the Roosevelts, you should definitely look into the FDR Presidential Library’s digital archives. They have an incredible collection of her "My Day" columns which she continued to write almost until the very end, showing just how much she pushed through the pain. You might also find the work of Dr. Howard Markel or Dr. Barron Lerner worth a read if you want the deep-dive medical specifics on 20th-century infectious diseases.