Adolph Hitler's ill health

Excerpts from an interesting post at Neatorama, citing Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader:

Dr. Schenck had been fed a steady diet of photographs, films, and propaganda posters of Hitler since the dictator had come to power in 1933. But the man he saw in the bunker looked nothing like those images. The 56-year-old Hitler “was a living corpse, a dead soul,” Schenck remembered in a 1985 interview. “His spine was hunched, his shoulder blades protruded from his bent back, and he collapsed his shoulders like a turtle… I was looking into the eyes of death.”

Even more shocking than the way Hitler looked was the way he moved about the bunker. He walked with the slow, halting shuffle of a man thirty years older, dragging his left leg behind him as he went. He couldn’t go more than a few steps without grabbing onto something for support.

Hitler’s head, arms, and entire left side trembled and jerked uncontrollably. No longer able to write his own name, he signed important documents with a rubber stamp...

According to one estimate, by the early 1940s, Hitler was taking 92 different kinds of drugs, including 63 different pills and skin lotions. Some medicines were taken only when specific complaints arose, but others were taken every day. By the summer of 1941, Hitler was popping between 120 and 150 pills a week on average. And on top of all the pills, Morell also administered injections -as many as 10 a day, sometimes more...

Most of the pills and shots that Hitler took were unidentified and mysterious, but Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills came in a little metal container...  that identified them by name and even listed the active ingredients: gentian, belladonna, and an extract of something called nux vomica...

Hitler’s valets, secretaries, and other close aides occasionally witnessed the shots being administered, and after the war they all described how the sleepy and sometimes completely exhausted Führer responded to all the injections instantly, sometimes even while the needle was still in his arm...

Much more information at the links.  Very interesting.