Memoranda and Documents

biographers, and yet it was an event of considerable moment. Indeed, without much evidence to support their view, at least two biographers have suggested that Adams suffered no diminished intellectual capacity either before or after his personal crisis. "As Adams's physical pace slowed his cerebral activity seemed by contrast to gather intensity," Ernest Samuels has said of the years leading up to the stroke, and Arline Boucher Tehan has concluded that Adams was "as mentally vigorous as ever" in 1915, three years after his illness.' Adams's letters, edited by Samuels himself and others, tell a different story.2 If they are read carefully with a present-day medical understanding of what the gathering symptoms recorded there forebode, then not only will we have a more realistic view of Adams's final years but we can clear him of the charge of attempted suicide that has been leveled against him.