KEY POINTS:
WASHINGTON - More books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other American, about 14,000 of them in all.
By the time the 16th American president was felled by an assassin's bullet in 1865, the 'Honest Abe' industry was already in full spate.
He was shot on Good Friday and died the following morning. By Easter Sunday, preachers up and down the country, were declaring Lincoln a martyr who had died to save the Union.
Since then a mythical image of a bearded man in a tall hat has hovered over the country.
Yesterday the Lincoln industry got another twist, when something that artists, sculptors and photographers have known all along - that President Abe's face had a good side - was confirmed by science.
Laser scans of two life masks, made from plaster casts of Lincoln's face, reveal an unusual degree of facial asymmetry, according to a new study.
The left side of Lincoln's face was much smaller than the right, an aberration called cranial facial microsomia.
The defect joins a long list of ailments - including smallpox, heart illness and depression - that modern doctors have diagnosed in the US Civil War-era president.
Confirmation of the defect is unlikely to stop today's politicians wrapping themselves tightly in his image time, the most notorious being the Republican presidential candidate John McCain whose candidacy is in deep trouble.
But what those who invoke his name to their cause like to forget is that he enjoyed telling filthy stories and that his racial views would have him drummed out of politics today.
Books have been written to fit all sorts of obsessions and biases.
There is one - written by a fundamentalist Christian - which sets out o prove that he was a fundamentalist Christian - despite a lifetime of spent ignoring organised religion.
Another book says his greatness lay in his struggle with clinical depression, written by someone who himself had clinical depression. More recently and most hotly denied was a book written by a gay activist proving that Abe was gay.
However, the science underpinning the latest revision of his image seems water tight. Lincoln's contemporaries noted his left eye at times drifted upward independently of his right eye, a condition now termed strabismus.
Lincoln's smaller left eye socket may have displaced a muscle controlling vertical movement, said Dr Ronald Fishman, who led the study published in the August issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology.
Most people's faces are asymmetrical, Fishman said, but Lincoln's case was extreme, with the bony ridge over his left eye rounder and thinner than the right side, and set backward.
Lincoln's appearance was mocked by his political enemies, historians say. The author Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote of the president's "homely sagacity" and his "sallow, queer, sagacious visage."
The sculptor of Mount Rushmore - the bizarre South Dakota monument of several US presidents - described the left side of Lincoln's face as primitive, immature and unfinished.
When Lincoln was a boy, he was kicked in the head by a horse. What is not known is whether the kick or a developmental defect - or neither - gave Lincoln his lopsided face.
Using a scanning technique is usually used to create 3-D images of children with cleft lip and palate before and after surgery, scientists scanned a bronze and a plaster copy of two life masks, owned by the Chicago History Museum.
Life masks were in vogue in the 1860s and Lincoln cooperated with sculptors to make them twice, in 1860 before his first presidential nomination, and in 1865, two months before his assassination.
As Lincoln himself said: "Nobody has ever expected me to be president. In my poor, lean lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting."
- INDEPENDENT
