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Shakespeare's tremor and Orwell's cough
John Ross - Shakespeare's tremor and Orwell's cough
John Ross is US medical doctor with literary interests. In this book he describes number of kind of case histories of literary greats.
Some of the articles are pure speculation (like whether Shakespeare had syphilis or not), others are based of medical records. Ross admits that himself. He has his own theories about most of the cases but also mentionsa that "pandemic of mercury poisoning among the great writers in English would strain the credulity of the reader". Note that this has been one theory of Napoleon's death as well.
Cases include John Milton going blind; dementia of Jonathan Swift; Bronte Sisters succumbing to tuberculosis they had probably contracted during their abusive private schooling (and TB took Orwell as well); Maladies of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville; How Yeats (and Freud) had himself effectively castrated to be able to retain his creativity; and malpractice that proved fatal to Jack London.
In the process Ross also described advances (and "advances") of medicine (including goat-testicle extracts, medicines from ground human bones and heavy lead content of ayurvedic medicines) and digresses to things like the Fascist leanings of Ezra Pound and how wealth may not be conducive to literary creativity.
Ross is also sarcastic (or maybe passive aggressive) about how things have (not really) changed in terms of physicians using their patients for medical experiments for academic renown. He also speculates that USA has so many bipolars because excitable rebels stayed and stolid Tories fled to Canada.
John Ross is US medical doctor with literary interests. In this book he describes number of kind of case histories of literary greats.
Some of the articles are pure speculation (like whether Shakespeare had syphilis or not), others are based of medical records. Ross admits that himself. He has his own theories about most of the cases but also mentionsa that "pandemic of mercury poisoning among the great writers in English would strain the credulity of the reader". Note that this has been one theory of Napoleon's death as well.
Cases include John Milton going blind; dementia of Jonathan Swift; Bronte Sisters succumbing to tuberculosis they had probably contracted during their abusive private schooling (and TB took Orwell as well); Maladies of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville; How Yeats (and Freud) had himself effectively castrated to be able to retain his creativity; and malpractice that proved fatal to Jack London.
In the process Ross also described advances (and "advances") of medicine (including goat-testicle extracts, medicines from ground human bones and heavy lead content of ayurvedic medicines) and digresses to things like the Fascist leanings of Ezra Pound and how wealth may not be conducive to literary creativity.
Ross is also sarcastic (or maybe passive aggressive) about how things have (not really) changed in terms of physicians using their patients for medical experiments for academic renown. He also speculates that USA has so many bipolars because excitable rebels stayed and stolid Tories fled to Canada.