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

SHAKESPEARE'S TREMOR AND ORWELUS COUGH: Medical Lives of Famous Writers

WRITTEN BY John Ross

PUBLISHED BY St. Martin's Press, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-31260-076-1, Hardcover, pp. 304; PRICE: $28.99CAD

From the frequency with which Shakespeare refers in his plays and sonnets to the pox and his apparently firsthand acquaintance with both its distressing symptoms and the quack cures of his time, it is not farfetched to consider that he might himself have had syphilis. This would account for one of the few known facts about him; namely, his steadily deteriorating handwriting. Jonathon Swift foretold that he would die like a tree, "from the top down" Did he, perhaps, suffer from some Alzheimer-like dementia? And what of the Bronte sisters dying in their lonely parsonage on the moors; was this a case of serial pneumonia?

These and other fascinating medical speculations are served up by John Ross, a Harvard Professor of Medicine. A premise of the book, which, thanks to the author's skill and insight, is amply borne out, is that a writer's medical history can shed light on his oeuvre. In all, Professor Ross considers the medical histories of Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, the Brontes, Hawthorne, Melville, Yeats, Jack London, Joyce, and Orwell. Mini-biographies are supplemented by a detailed analysis of what is known of the writer's medical conditions (even if, on occasion, it is essentially hypochondriac), and the result is both fascinating and informative.

A recurrent theme is how often the medical practitioners to whom these authors turned actually worsened their condition. Of course, we smugly imagine that we have moved away from the era of leeching, enforced sweats, and near-lethal doses of mercury. But perhaps a generation or two from now, our contemporary medical nostrums will appear no less bizarre.

The other theme that struck me as I read these pages was the courage of the authors: whatever their ailment, however debilitating the symptoms, most authors doggedly refused to abandon their muse; through pain, pus, fever, palsies, blindness, and madness, they wrote on, struggling to put into words their own vision of life. The writers, not the doctors, are the heroes of this fascinating book.

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University.