Factoid of the day

I'm listening to a BBC podcast about "useful idiots" and they mention Stalin had a withered right hand and facial scarring from childhood smallpox.

More here: he was born with it, so supposedly it was Erb's palsy...some of the discussion wonder if it was from being beaten (either by his father or in jail) but one posted noted his hands were different lengths, which suggests Erb's palsy.

Factoid two: Kaiser William (of WWI) had a similar problem.

Since Erb's palsy is usually due to the midwife/doctor pulling too hard on the head of the child to get the shoulders out (usually due to shoulder dystocia) and shoulder dystocia can result in a dead baby, one shudders to think up an alternative history, where either they didn't get this birth injury (and weren't psychologically affected by it) or if they had died at birth...

Or in Stalin's case, if he had died of Smallpox.

If you really want to get into pscyho history, imagine if FDR never had polio (or died from it) or if Churchill had died in the Boer war or from that car accident in New York...