LEXANDRIA, Va. - Presidential candidate John McCain had skin cancer six years ago but was declared cured, according to medical records released yesterday that pronounce him in ''good physical and mental health.''
A cancerous mole removed from his shoulder was small and had not invaded deep into his skin or spread.
The records show no sign of recurrence.
Severe wounds suffered as a POW in Vietnam left McCain with degenerative arthritis in his shoulders and right knee that may someday require joint replacement, his physicians said.
Otherwise, ''I found you to be in excellent health,'' wrote McCain's personal physician, John Eckstein, who has conducted annual exams for the Arizona senator since 1992.
Hundreds of documents were released to the Associated Press to counter what aides call a ''whisper campaign'' engineered by Republican rivals challenging his mental fitness.
Current and contemporaneous notes by medical personnel conclude that 5 1/2 years of imprisonment left McCain with no psychological wounds.
''He had a very healthy way of dealing with his experiences,'' Dr. Michael Ambrose, director of the Robert E. Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies, said in a telephone interview.
The center routinely examines POWs. McCain took a battery of physical and mental tests at the center over a 20-year period after his 1973 release.
''There was never any mental illness,'' Ambrose said.
The campaign plans to release the records tomorrow, with small sections of his psychological reports withheld from the public because they were deemed personal and irrelevant to McCain's physical or mental health.
The released material summarizes McCain's concerns about his family, as well as a worry that imprisonment cost him 5 1/2 years of his life.
Asked during a 1973 exam how he coped with the POW trauma, McCain said, ''Faith in country, USN, family and God.'' USN refers to the Navy, where McCain served as a pilot.
McCain's first marriage ended in divorce in 1980, seven years after his release. He remarried later that year.
The records suggest a normal temper, though critics have called McCain volatile.
One of the examiners wrote that McCain learned in prison ''to control his temper better, to not become angry over insignificant things.''
He was described several times as having a ''histrionic pattern of personality adjustment,'' which Ambrose defined as an outgoing personality.
Ambrose said the type of cancer McCain suffered is usually caused by sun exposure. He said McCain and his fellow prisoners were kept in the Vietnamese sun for long periods, though it is impossible to link the cancer to his imprisonment.
The mole that was removed from McCain's shoulder in December 1993 proved to be melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer.
''We think he is cured,'' Eckstein said.
McCain regularly has suspicious skin lesions or moles removed, often basal cell carcinoma, the least aggressive and most common type of skin cancer, the report said.
