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Transcription: [00:22:03]
{Speaker 1} [[?]] the portrait of Charles Sumner, who was a good friend of both Mary and Lincoln,

[00:22:09]
their relationship is interesting.

[00:22:11]
{SPEAKER name="Erin Carlson Mast"}
Yeah throughout their entire lives, and that's also someone

[00:22:13]
--Mary did have a tendency to win people over who didn't necessarily feel a close connection with her up front,

[00:22:19]
just as Abraham is able to charm people who meet him for the first time with preconceptions and judgements about who he is,

[00:22:27]
and Sumner was a friend to Mary well after Lincoln's assassination as well, so.

[00:22:33]
{Speaker 1} And may I add in Mary's defense that when she was declared insane by her son Robert's actions

[00:22:39]
and examined by --testified against-- by doctors who had never, ever examined her,

[00:22:45]
she smuggled a letter out to one of the first woman lawyers and got her freedom to go back to her sister's

[00:22:50]
and she later went through the trouble of going to court and having herself declared sane again, but once branded, forget it.

[00:22:58]
{SPEAKER name="Erin Carlson Mast"}
Once, exactly, once branded forget it, and that actually, I mean that spins off into interesting stories in general

[00:23:03]
about the nature of institutional care and how oftentimes women were institutionalized

[00:23:10]
because they were considered an embarrassment to their family. And Robert tried to defend his decision

[00:23:18]
to institutionalize his mother because he did actually feel some pushback from people who thought maybe he was doing it for his own personal political ambitions, yeah.

[00:23:30]
Have you found anything to support the idea that she was a victim of diabetes which really wasn't well known at the time

[00:23:38]
and well treated and then part of her personality difficulties would've been high blood sugar gone out of control?

[00:23:45]
{SPEAKER name="Erin Carlson Mast"}
I have read that, but, um, like a lot of the posthumous diagnoses of Mary Lincoln,

[00:23:51]
it's really hard to sort out what is more likely than another because, I mean,

[00:23:56]
she's also been declared schizophrenic posthumously and it's --I mean-- a lot of the evidence might support that she did have one of those conditions,

[00:24:05]
but there's really no way that we can be certain.

[00:24:07]
{Speaker 2} Thank you very much for coming everyone, I want to remind you, you're standing in one of the very finest collections

[00:24:16]
of Lincoln portraits and Lincoln ephemera anywhere. There are 4 or 5 genuinely singular