An Alarming History of Famous and Difficult Patients: Amusing Medical Anecdotes from Typhoid Mary to FDR

A compendium about the medical travails of famous people throughout history offers colorful anecdotes and intriguing observations about such difficult patients as Stalin, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, and King Charles II.

From the prolific author of a long string of amusing doctor books (the Doctor in the House series) and quirky medical histories, an oddball assortment of chatty, impertinent anecdotes about the afflictions of 31 well-known people, real and fictional. This time, the doctor has his fun at the expense of such political figures as Washington, Napoleon, Hitler, and Churchill; royals such as Queen Victoria and Germany's Frederick III; literary luminaries from Boswell to Proust; and assorted others, including van Gogh, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes. Aware that Washington's ownership of false teeth is a familiar story, Gordon enlarges the retelling by informing us of 18th-century dental practice-- transplants from cadavers, dentures from walrus tusks--thereby making us value dentistry's advances in recent times. The notion of medicine's progress permeates Gordon's accounts, for the treatments that 17th- and 18th-century doctors inflicted on patients-- purgatives, enemas, bleedings, cuppings, and numerous foul concoctions--now seem not merely ineffective but downright death-promoting. Perhaps even more terrifying is the idea of surgery without anesthesia; Gordon's graphic description of the operation Pepys endured for removal of bladder stones sticks in the mind. Clever and gossipy, Gordon's brief anecdotes are full of name-dropping and sexual tittle-tattle: Boswell had gonorrhea, Carlyle was impotent, Florence Nightingale was a lesbian, and Hitler had only a right testicle. It is relief to come to the last chapter, where Gordon has the most fun of all with fictional figures. Dr. Watson's letter to Freud about his neurotic friend Holmes is a gem, as is Freud's reply. Discovering the human frailties of notable men and women (Byron had sclerosis of the liver, Proust suffered from mother-fixation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was anorexic) does little to increase appreciation of their work but certainly cuts them down to size. For the most part, this is pretty low stuff, the National Enquirer for history buffs. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Queen Victoria tended to plumpness, yet when one of her doctors suggested a reducing diet, she objected until she conceived a suitable compromise: adding the diet to her regular intake! Those already acquainted with Gordon's writing, in the venerable British humor magazine Punch or any of his 45 books, know his clever literary allusions, delightful wit, and amusing contradictions and ironies (e.g., this opening sentence: "Paganini became a difficult patient only when he was dead"). As in his other works, his historical knowledge herein proves solid, often surprising, and always pertinent. You may think that George Washington, Hitler, FDR, Boswell, Whitman, Shaw, and similar worthies have probably had their medical histories worked to death, so to speak, but such is not the case. Gordon consistently comes up with remarkable details and presents them in an enlightening and enjoyable manner, making of them one of those rare books to be gulped whole or consumed in bits and pieces with equal pleasure. William Beatty