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

Ross, John J.

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9780312600761: Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough: The Medical Lives of Famous Writers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312600763 ISBN 13: 9780312600761

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2012

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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.

Were Shakespeare's shaky handwriting, his obsession with venereal disease, and his premature retirement connected? Did John Milton 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 Jonathan Swift'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 Bront� family? What was the cause of Nathaniel Hawthorne's sudden demise? Were Herman Melville's disabling attacks of eye and back pain the product of "nervous affections," 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 Jack London a suicide, or was his death the product of a series of self-induced medical misadventures? Why did W. B. Yeats's doctors dose him with toxic amounts of arsenic? Did James Joyce need several horrific eye operations because of a strange autoimmune disease acquired from a Dublin streetwalker? Did writing Nineteen Eighty-Four actually kill George Orwell? The Bard meets House, M.D. 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 Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough, 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.

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About the Author:

JOHN J. ROSS is a physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He lives in the Boston area with his family.

1. THE HARDEST KNIFE ILL-USED:

Shakespeare’s Tremor

The real mystery of Shakespeare, a thousand times more mysterious than any matter of the will, is: why is it that—unlike Dante, Cervantes, Chaucer, Tolstoy, whomever you wish—he makes what seems a voluntary choice to stop writing?
—Harold Bloom
In Shakespeare’s tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote.
—Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses”
Twenty years he lived in London ... Twenty years he dallied there between conjugal love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
His fitful fever returned. Master Shakespeare pulled the hood of his cloak down low over his eyes and hurried from his lodgings in Bishopsgate, walking as quickly as he could on his hobbled legs. He awkwardly dodged a pair of rambling pigs and picked his way through the dung and muck of the city streets. The stench and filth rarely troubled him now, as they had when he first came here from the country. Nearer the bridge, the clamor of the city increased: the clatter of carts, the cries of street peddlers, the gossip of alewives, the drunken braggadocio of London gallants. A black-clad Puritan surveyed the scene sourly and made brief eye contact with Will. The player hung his head and balled his hands into fists—to hide the telltale rash on his palms.
London Bridge was marvelous and strange, a massive structure built over with splendid houses. With relief he entered the dark, claustrophobic tunnel beneath the dwellings. Inside, a continual roar of noise: the tidal rush of water between the ancient piers; waterwheels creaking; apprentices brawling; carters disputing the right-of-way; a blind fiddler playing; sheep bleating on their way to Eastcheap, bound for slaughter. He left the shelter of the bridge, and emerged into painful sunlight on the other side. His shins throbbed and his muscles ached. In spite of himself, he peered up at the great stone gate at the end of the bridge, adorned with traitors’ heads on pikes. Shreds of moldy flesh clung to the grinning skulls, their tattered hair bleached by sun and rain.
In Southwark, he heard the barking mastiffs and the howling crowd at the Bear Garden. He imagined old Sackerson the bear bellowing, lashing out with his claws, chained to a post, set on by dogs. A glimpse of ragged children playing in an alley filled him with thoughts of home and a pang of loneliness and shame. Before a row of brothels he saw a scabby beggarwoman with sunken nose and ulcerated shins. After years of faithful service in the stews, she has been turned out in the street to die of the pox. A chill of fear ran up his spine, and he looked away.
There was a pounding in his head and he felt dull and stupid. He circled many times through a maze of flyblown houses before he stumbled on the place. A servant showed him down a set of stairs. The bard descended into a hot cellar reeking of sulfur. A vast oven filled the room with flickering orange light. The sweaty heads of groaning men peered out from large wooden tubs. But the tubs were not filled with water. A sallow and emaciated man carrying iron tongs scurried round, feeding hot bricks into the tubs through a trapdoor. He poured vinegar onto the heaps of bricks and acrid steam rose up, making the glistening men within moan and shake.
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.
Shakespeare extended a handful of silver coins. The physician took them with a gloved hand, scrutinized them carefully, and put them in his purse with the hint of a smirk. He pointed Will toward the skinny, pallid man tending bricks at the great oven. When the poet looked round again, the doctor had vanished.
The gaunt man tending the bricks was not quite right in the head. His hands shook, and he seemed both timorous and irritable. When he saw the poet’s rash, he cackled and slobbered, revealing a mouth full of rotten teeth. “Bit by a Winchester goose, eh? Ha-ha! A few good sweats will fix that, my lad. Into the powdering tub with you, then!”
The poet stripped and stood ashamed, his flesh covered in scaly blots. He nervously clambered over the side of a tub, and sat down on a plank nailed to the side. Under the plank, the wooden bottom had been removed, leaving an earthen pit. The queer thin man clumsily secured a heavy lid over the top of the tub, leaving an opening just large enough for the poet’s head. Then he popped open the trapdoor at the base of the tub and placed a hot metal plate at the poet’s feet. He tossed red powder on the plate. The dust disappeared in a mephitic bloom of hissing fumes. The doctor’s man repeated this again and again, until Will began to gag. A fine metallic powder settled on his body. The thin man piled hot bricks into the pit under the seat, and doused them with vinegar. As the acid waves of steam billowed upward, the bard started to tremble and sweat. This week would not be a pleasant one.
* * *
Even those who know little about Shakespeare are aware that there is a sort of controversy about the authorship of his plays. A vocal and eccentric minority doubts that a man of Shakespeare’s background could possess literary genius, and speculates his plays were really written by an aristocrat who wished for some reason to remain anonymous. This belief rests on two snobbish and mistaken assumptions: first, that a great deal of formal education is essential for great writing; and second, that creativity depends on wealth and comfort. A good case could be made that the exact opposite is true. Many great authors were largely self-taught, and either did not attend university or dropped out. Furthermore, a dose of youthful misery may help a writer by serving as a powerful stimulus to fantasy and imagination. A recurrent biographical pattern in great writers is a happy early childhood, followed by an adolescence made insecure by financial catastrophe, the loss of a parent, or other traumas. Such was the case with William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was born in April 1564, in the market town of Stratford. We know almost nothing about his mother Mary, but quite a lot about his father. John Shakespeare combined something of Falstaff’s wit and rascality, Kent’s stubbornness and loyalty, and Lear’s feckless ill judgment. He made a lawful fortune from the glove trade, and an illegal one from usury and black market wool dealing. His fellow citizens liked him well enough to elect him the town’s bailiff, an office akin to that of mayor today. However, the gossamer prosperity of the Shakespeares unraveled in William’s teenage years, as John ran afoul of the law and lost much of his money and his lands. Elizabethan England was something between a modern constitutional monarchy and a police state. Spies and informers enforced religious orthodoxy and an oppressive system of trade regulations and monopolies. John Shakespeare was fined heavily, not only for his shady business practices, but also for his repeated failures to attend Protestant services, one of several signs that the family were probably closet Catholics.
If John Shakespeare once hoped to send his brilliant oldest son to get a gentleman’s university education, near bankruptcy now made this impossible. Young Will would have studied Latin and rhetoric in the local grammar school until the age of fifteen or sixteen, probably getting more formal education than Dickens, Yeats, or Herman Melville would receive. He then may have served as a tutor in a noble Catholic household in Lancashire. By age eighteen, he was back in Stratford and hastily wed to Anne Hathaway, twenty-six years old and two months pregnant at the time of the marriage. According to tradition, Will toiled in his father’s glove shop, and might also have moonlighted as a scrivener or a law clerk. Anne gave birth to the couple’s daughter Susannah in May 1583, followed by the twins, Hamnet and Judith, in February 1585. Shortly thereafter, Shakespeare went to seek his fortune in London. According to a durable—if somewhat dubious—Stratford legend, Shakespeare was whipped for poaching deer on the lands of one Sir Thomas Lucy, a notorious persecutor of local Catholics. Will made matters worse by posting a lampoon of Lucy on his park gate, and fled town one step ahead of Lucy’s thugs.
London was home to a burgeoning and intensely competitive theater scene. Some playwrights were college graduates; others, such as Shakespeare, Kyd, and Jonson, were not. Shakespeare’s quick success, rural origins, and lack of a university degree made him the natural target of jealous attacks from the University Wits. These included Robert Greene, George Peele, and that great spendthrift of language, Thomas Nashe, a trio as noted for their depravity as for their abundant literary talents. All three would soon be dead. Their enemies blamed their passing on the pox, or syphilis, the dread disease that became a Shakespearian obsession.
By the early 1590s, Shakespeare had obtained the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. Wriothesley was an effete dandy of flexible sexuality, with a penchant for poetry. Both of Shakespeare’s racy, best-selling narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, are dedicated to him. The dedication for Lucrece, published in 1594, suggests that by then Shakespeare and Southamp...

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