Arguing about candidates’ health makes me feel really icky. Why?

For 18 days in 1972, Thomas Eagleton was the Democratic party’s candidate for vice-president.

On July 31, under pressure from Democrats and the media, Eagleton left the race.

His health had caught up with him.

As of September 2016, we know that Donald Trump’s cholesterol is 169. And Hillary Clinton recently took the dangerous antibiotic Levaquin.

Last month, the American Psychiatric Association had to remind its members to stop diagnosing candidates, after everyone decided that Donald Trump had narcissistic personality disorder.

Even before her recent bout with pneumonia, Trump and his surrogates diagnosed Clinton with dysphasia and mental instability, and declared she was “mentally impaired” with “special needs.”

Suddenly, everyone was “talking” (by which I mean, “speculating madly”) about the candidates’ health. And most of these conversations assumed that this discussion was perfectly normal and appropriate.

To be clear, I think this behavior is icky.

First, little of this discussion involves actual, serious medical professionals.

Second, some of our best presidents were in terrible health!

But most of the arguments about Clinton and Trump’s health are based on the premise that a person with a physical or mental condition cannot also be president of the United States.

That idea (a) seems factually wrong and (b) seems morally wrong. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s, frankly, gross behavior. (Not to mention — arguments about candidates’ health are often full of ageism, sexism, and ableism.)

And while you can make a good argument for the idea that a candidate must have the physical and mental capability to perform their duties as president, that is most certainly not the kind of argument we are having.

But it wasn’t always this way. The tradition of combing over politicians’ medical records began with the Eagleton Affair.

Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern chose Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in 1972.

Eagleton was an up-and-coming Senator from Missouri. Several other contenders turned down the job, so McGovern asked Eagleton to be his running mate. After a drawn-out vote, Eagleton was confirmed by the party on July 13, and he gave his acceptance speech at 2am on July 14. The rushed selection left little time for a background check of Eagleton.

Soon after the convention ended, rumors about Eagleton began to circulate. The McGovern campaign and some news organizations received anonymous phone tips about McGovern’s health. Initially, some members of the media speculated that Eagleton had a history of alcoholism or drunk driving.

On July 25, 1972, Eagleton disclosed his mental health history to the public in a press conference. He said that he was hospitalized three times in the 1960s for “nervous exhaustion” and depression. During his hospitalization, he underwent electroconvulsive (“shock”) therapy twice.

Until the rumors began, Eagleton had not previously disclosed his health history to McGovern or the Democratic party. But after the disclosure, McGovern supported Eagleton, saying he was “1000 percent” behind him.

But pressure began to build. The New York Times, Washington Post, and leaders of the Democratic Party called for Eagleton to withdraw from the nomination. Much of the criticism focused on Eagleton’s failure to disclose his history before the rumors emerged.

Other critics focused on the vice president’s access to power. According to McGovern’s campaign manager Gary Hart, “This was the height of the Cold War. The key here wasn’t how do we feel about mental illness or therapy or anything like that. The key was — finger on the button.”

On July 29, Eagleton insisted that he would stay on the ticket. But behind closed doors, McGovern was talking to psychiatrists and Eagleton’s doctors, who advised him that Eagleton’s health posed too great a risk.

On July 31, eighteen days after officially joining the Democratic ticket, Eagleton withdrew from the campaign. The withdrawal came at the request of McGovern, who replaced him with Sargent Shriver. In November, McGovern lost to Nixon in a landslide.

Eagleton was the first candidate on a national ticket to disclose a history of mental health treatment.

On August 1, Eagleton spoke to CBS News, and said:

“[McGovern] expressed his confidence in me. He expressed satisfaction that my health was adequate. But he pointed out, and an argument can be made on this side, that if I remained on the ticket, all the attention and all the debate would be about Eagleton and, as George calls it, ‘his past medical history.’ And it would take away from focusing on some problems that have to be attended to — the Vietnam War, the economy, the credibility gap, etc., etc., — important issues that he must debate, and should debate, and need to be debated.”

At some point, politicians’ health matters were underreported or off-limits, just like their extramarital affairs or their weird modeling careers.

For example, in 1919, few people knew that President Woodrow Wilson had a stroke or that his wife had taken over many of his responsibilities. Abraham Lincoln allegedly took pills for depression, and Nixon regularly took Valium. President Grover Cleveland had oral cancer in 1893, but the news wasn’t made public until 20 years later. And the White House discouraged the media from showing the full extent of Franklin Roosevelt’s condition in 1944.

Press coverage of politicians’ health began to change in the second half of the 20th century, as both Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson had well-publicized health problems while in office. But even in 1960, John F. Kennedy’s campaign worked hard to hide his diagnosis of Addison’s disease, despite the best efforts of Richard Nixon (whose operatives allegedly tried to break into the office of Kennedy’s endocrinologist).

Then came the Eagleton affair.

Since 1972, the health of politicians (and what they choose to disclose about their health) has remained a campaign issue. In 2008, John McCain released 1,173 pages of medical records. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton chose to keep his medical records private, which led critics to speculate about what he was hiding.

In 1988, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis had to repeatedly deny rumors that he sought psychiatric treatment for depression after the death of his brother. President Ronald Reagan joked about Dukakis’s rumored bout with depression, saying, “Look, I’m not going to pick on an invalid.” Reagan later said, “I was kidding.” (Years later, Dukakis’s wife Kitty admitted to receiving psychiatric treatment and electroconvulsive therapy in 2001, in her book Shock. Michael and Kitty now both work to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness.)

And now we have this: