Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough: The Medical Lives of Famous Writers

<p><i>The doctor suddenly appeared beside Will, startling him. He was sleek and prosperous, with a dainty goatee. Though he smiled reassuringly, the poet noticed that he kept a safe distance. In a soothing, urbane voice, the physician explained the treatment: stewed prunes to evacuate the bowels; succulent meats to ease digestion; cinnabar and the sweating tub to cleanse the disease from the skin. The doctor warned of minor side effects: uncontrolled drooling, fetid breath, bloody gums, shakes and palsies. Yet desperate diseases called for desperate remedies, of course.</i></p><p>Were <b>Shakespeare</b>'s shaky handwriting, his obsession with venereal disease, and his premature retirement connected? Did <b>John Milton</b> go blind from his propaganda work for the Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell, as he believed, or did he have a rare and devastating complication of a very common eye problem? Did <b>Jonathan Swift</b>'s preoccupation with sex and filth result from a neurological condition that might also explain his late-life surge in creativity? What Victorian plague wiped out the entire <b>Bronte </b>family? What was the cause of <b>Nathaniel Hawthorne</b>'s sudden demise? Were <b>Herman Melville</b>'s disabling attacks of eye and back pain the product of &quot;nervous affections,&quot; as his family and physicians believed, or did he actually have a malady that was unknown to medical science until well after his death? Was<b> Jack London </b>a suicide, or was his death the product of a series of self-induced medical misadventures? Why did <b>W. B. Yeats</b>'s doctors dose him with toxic amounts of arsenic? <b>Did James Joyce</b> need several horrific eye operations because of a strange autoimmune disease acquired from a Dublin streetwalker? Did writing <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i> actually kill <b>George Orwell</b>? The Bard meets <i>House, M.D.</i> in this fascinating untold story of the impact of disease on the lives and works of some the finest writers in the English language. In <i>Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough</i><i>,</i> John Ross cheerfully debunks old biographical myths and suggests fresh diagnoses for these writers' real-life medical mysteries. The author takes us way back, when leeches were used for bleeding and cupping was a common method of cure, to a time before vaccinations, sterilized scalpels, or real drug regimens. With a healthy dose of gross descriptions and a deep love for the literary output of these ten greats, Ross is the doctor these writers should have had in their time of need.</p>