Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough: Diagnosing the Medical Groans and Last Gasps of Ten Great Writers

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 Shakespeares 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 Swifts 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 Brontë family? What was the cause of Nathaniel Hawthornes sudden demise? Were Herman Melvilles 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. Yeatss 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 Shakespeares Tremor and Orwells 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.