JOSHUA PRAGER is the author of three books, most recently The Family Roe, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. A former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal, he received a literature award in 2023 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two daughters. His website is joshuaprager.com.
On August 16, 1918, a bookkeeper in Denver named George Eyser wrote a will. He was not married and had no children. And so it was to his only sibling, his sister Ottilie, with whom he lived in a twostory brick house at 420 Downing Street, that he bequeathed his property and possessions: money, the proceeds from an insurance policy, a gold watch and chain, a scrapbook that chronicled the nearly three decades he spent as an amateur gymnast, and his crowning glory—the six Olympic medals he won on a single October day in 1904.
One hundred and twenty years later, as we near this summer’s Paris Olympic Games, no athlete has won as many medals on a single day as Eyser did. The three golds, two silvers, and one bronze he received at the St. Louis games remain just two shy of the record for individual medals at an entire Olympiad (a record shared by swimmer Michael Phelps and gymnast Aleksandr Dityatin). And yet, it is not Eyser’s medals that most distinguish him. It is rather, as a category on Jeopardy! once put it, his “anatomical oddity”: George Eyser had a wooden leg.
That a one-legged athlete would so much as reach the Olympics is, of course, remarkable. That Eyser also won—and won and won and won and won and won—enshrined him in Olympic lore. Still, it is above all Eyser’s missing limb, not Eyser himself, that is recalled today. For all but nothing is known of the man—of his family, his disability, the 48 years he lived until his death in 1919, just months after he wrote his will. Eyser, wrote Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic, “vanished from the history books.” Even his cause of death has, until now, remained a mystery. As one Olympics blogger asked back in 2010: “George Eyser, what happened to you?”
Way back in 1870, at a hospital in the German port city of Kiel, a doctor pondered a similar question as he wrote a report about George’s father titled “Medical examination of the state of mind of the businessman Georg Eyser.” Georg was a new patient. Thirty, Lutheran, and middle class, he had been admitted three weeks before, leaving his pregnant wife and daughter in the town of Husum, some 50 miles away on the North Sea. For two years, Georg had been decompensating, feeling at first “irascible and careless,” he told his doctor, and then distrustful, anxious, and violent. He had left his job as a merchant and declared that “he ought to die,” and then that relatives wished to kill him.
The hospital noted that one of Georg’s uncles had died “mentally ill.” And when Georg did not improve, he transferred to a mental asylum in the town of Schleswig. He
