Laser scan of Lincoln's death mask reveals President's lop-sided face

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 on Good Friday in 1865, the "Honest Abe" industry was already in full spate.

Since then, a mythical image of a bearded man in a tall hat has hovered over the country. But 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.

Using a scanning technique normally used to create 3D images of children with cleft lips and palates before and after surgery, scientists scanned a bronze and a plaster copy of two life masks, owned by the Chicago History Museum. 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 using his image. But what those who invoke his name to their cause like to forget is that he enjoyed telling filthy stories and that his views on race 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 to prove that he was a fundamentalist Christian, despite a lifetime spent ignoring organised religion. Another book says his greatness lay in his struggle with clinical depression, written by someone with depression. More recently, was a book written by a gay activist saying Abe was gay.

But the science underpinning the latest revision of his image seems watertight. Lincoln's contemporaries noted his left eye at times drifted upwards independently of his right eye, a condition now termed strabismus. Lincoln's smaller, left eye socket may have had a displaced muscle controlling vertical movement, said Dr Ronald Fishman, who led the study published in the Archives of Ophthalmology.

Most people's faces are asymmetrical, Dr Fishman said, but Lincoln's case was extreme, with the bony ridge over his left eye rounder and thinner than the right, and set backwards.

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.

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."