pale, sickly, and small, standing a few inches above five feet and weighing less than 140 pounds.48 He was slight even by the standards of his own time. The writer Washington Irving, encountering him years later, would write, “Ah! poor Jemmy!—he is but a withered little apple-John.”49 Madison was extremely discreet about his health, but many years later would allude to his seizures in autobiographical notes, stating that “causes preventing him from entering the Army, viz his feeble health, and a Constitutional liability, to sudden attacks, somewhat resembling Epilepsy, and suspending the
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