The Illnesses That Flesh Is Heir To
An engrossing survey of the ills and ailments suffered by great writers.
'Herman Melville is
not well," one of the famously gloomy author's friends wrote in the
1850s. "Do not call him moody, he is ill." Melville's eyes, "tender as
young sparrows," were so sensitive that he had a shaded porch built onto
his house to spare them the full light of day. He also complained of
severe back pain—a combination of symptoms that makes John J. Ross, a
physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, suspect an
inflammatory autoimmune disease. (He suggests, however, that Melville
also had bipolar disorder.)
Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough
By John J. Ross
St. Martin's, 291 pages, $24.99
This diagnosis is only one of the puzzles that Dr. Ross considers in "Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough,"
his
engrossing account of the illnesses endured by Shakespeare, Milton,
Swift, the Brontës, Hawthorne, Melville, Yeats, Jack London, Joyce and
Orwell. His book, which deftly mixes close reading and diagnostic
acumen, will stay with me for a long time. My dominant emotion as I
finished it was gratitude: for the courage of the writers, who rose
above the pain, malaise, fevers, nausea, pus, palsies, blindness,
tinnitus and engulfing mental disorders that should have silenced their
muses; and for the advances that have made medicine infinitely more
effective and considerably more humane than it was when these master
spirits turned to doctors for help, swallowed their poisonous nostrums,
and complied with their absurd, often intrusive, and sometimes lethal
regimes.
Unsurprisingly, infectious diseases
dominate Dr. Ross's literary ward round as they dominated all eras in
which the germs that cause them were not understood and antibiotics not
available. The usual suspects, syphilis (Shakespeare), gonorrhea (Joyce)
and tuberculosis (the Brontës, Orwell), are joined by more exotic
transmissible misfortunes such as yaws, a tropical disease that causes
dreadful ulcers (London), and relapsing fever, or Brucellosis (Yeats).
Bipolar disorder—in which frenzied productivity alternates with
increasingly frequent crashes into depression—is plausibly ascribed to
Melville, Hawthorne and London. Some of Dr. Ross's subjects seem also to
have had mild autism, which made ordinary relationships agonizingly
difficult. Their medical troubles were frequently compounded by heroic
alcohol consumption, intended to mitigate their symptoms. Downwardly
mobile parents and other childhood traumas also loom large in the
literary C.V.
Job himself would have been grateful to
have been spared the burden of illness carried by Jack London. A
charismatic, handsome giant in his youth, he was a dying wreck at 40.
His problems included yaws, gout, kidney stones, a rotten mouth from
recurrent scurvy and massive fluid retention from nephritis. His
self-medication with an entire pharmacy's worth of remedies was
enthusiastically supported by his star-struck doctor. It included a
cocktail of morphine and atropine that killed a man who had survived
appalling ordeals at sea and in the Klondike and who, by the time he was
20, had outlived most of his waterfront mates. Even so, in the last
week of his life, he worked for a 60-hour stretch, broken only by two
hours' sleep, on a final unfinished novel. Melville similarly surmounted
family tragedies, critical neglect, profound depression, post-traumatic
stress disorder, alcoholism, cardiac failure and agonizing arthritis to
write "Billy Budd," the late masterpiece that showed how his mind could
still function at the highest level.
The contribution of doctors to the woes
of their eminent patients is shocking. While Milton's ghoulish
treatment with "usnea"—moss from the skull of a man who had died
violently (in plentiful supply in a damp country where there was an
abundance of severed heads rotting on pikes)—was useless for his
blindness, it was harmless compared with the arsenic, lead and mercury
prescribed for many ailments. The inexplicable silence of Shakespeare's
last years may have been the result of therapeutic mercury poisoning
rather than syphilis. Joyce's treatment for "an infamous private
ailment"—daily irrigations of his urethra with potassium permanganate—is
a reminder, if any were needed, that there has never been a better time
than now in the history of mankind to have a dose of clap.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne's
somewhat indiscreet physician, famously said of the medicine of his time
that if it were all thrown into the sea, it would be better for mankind
and worse for the fishes. The rise of evidence-based, scientifically
founded medicine is astonishingly recent—perhaps because it had to
triumph over our natural propensity to magic and intuitive thinking—and
the reversion to quackery is an ever-present threat, as the contemporary
flourishing of "alternative medicine" reminds us.
Dr. Ross recounts many ironies of the
medical lives of his subjects. Swift's death "from the head down" (to
use his own phrase for dementia) echoed the fate of the Struldbrugs in
his "Gulliver's Travels," to whom advancing age brought extreme
infirmity and the loss of sense and memory. Less familiar is the fact
that his disinhibition in the initial states of dementia was associated
with a late efflorescence of his poetic muse, though Dr. Ross is
cautious about suggesting a causal relationship. Yeats's failure to land
a chair in English literature at Trinity College Dublin because
dyslexia caused him to misspell "professorship" in his application is a
treasurable irony, given the thousands of professors whose careers have
been launched on his work.
I have scarcely touched on the richness
of this witty and deeply humane book. It would be worth reading for the
extraordinary tale of the pathologically shy Hawthorne, described by a
friend as "a fine ghost in a case of iron," who was lost, like Hester
Prynne, "in a dismal labyrinth of doubt." Dr. Ross avoids the common
mistake of overconfidence in his retrospective diagnoses, aware that
nothing fits so neatly as a wrong diagnosis. And he avoids the reductive
temptation of explaining the genius of his writers by pathologies that
are, after all, suffered also by the untalented. With the exception of
the abominable Milton—fawning before Cromwell, psychologically abusive
of his daughters—the writers emerge from Dr. Ross's account of their
lives with their status enhanced. Nothing could be further from a freak
show.
Though some of his stories are
familiar, they have never, in my experience, been told so well. Given
that many of Dr. Ross's subjects were suffering from infectious
diseases, it helps that this is his area of expertise. But he is also a
penetrating literary critic and a perceptive and humane observer of the
lives of writers and of those in their orbit. His light touch with
cultural, social and political history is something from which many of
the professionals in literary studies could learn. This is a book to
which I shall return again and again.
—Mr. Tallis's latest book is "Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity."
