Gout: The Patrician Malady

In their study of an ailment that has tormented the big toes of some big men--Kant, Samuel Johnson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson--Porter and Rousseau turn the argument of Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors on its head. Sontag thinks disease should be freed of its freight of cultural associations and stigmas.

But disease and metaphor inevitably go hand in hand. This was especially true in the days when gout was mysterious, before Queen Victoria's future physician showed it was caused by uric-acid crystals producing excruciating pain in the extremities. Milton told a friend that if he were only free of gout pain, blindness would be tolerable. The pain felt "as if I was walking on my eyeballs," writes one sufferer. Since one had to be rich to live long enough to get gout, and most victims were males (many of whom drank port laced with gout-intensifying lead), it won a reputation as just punishment for high living, and even a kind of badge of meritocratic honor. It was God's gift to caricaturists like Hogarth, Cruikshank, and Gillray. George Eliot used gout as a symbol for a sick society in Middlemarch. The data fascinates, but the professors don't wear their learning lightly. Still, they do score some good phrases. Explaining that there aren't many portraits of gout sufferers because few victims would pose, they write, "Who wants to be remembered as a septuagenarian freak of Falstaffian glob?" --Tim Appelo

Gout has fascinated medical writers and cultural commentators from the time of ancient Greece. Historically seen as a disease afflicting upper-class males of superior wit, genius, and creativity, it has included among its sufferers Erasmus, the Medici, Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson, Immanuel Kant, and Robert Browning. Gout has also been the subject of powerful medical folklore, viewed as a disease that protects its sufferers and assures long life. This dazzlingly insightful and readable book investigates the history of gout and through it offers a new perspective on medical and social history, sex, prejudice, and class, and explains why gout was gender specific.

Porter is a well-known medical historian at the Wellcome Institute in London and author of The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (LJ 2/15/98), perhaps the best general history of medicine available today. Rousseau is an English professor at the University of Aberdeen. Together, they have written a thorough and enlightening history of gout, whose most famous sufferers included Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon. They explore the medical establishment's changing views of gout and the public's reaction to the disease. They also examine the idea that gout was a disease of the wealthy and the graphic images of gout in the media. Particular attention is paid to the disease's literary aspects and how it has been portrayed in the novels of such authors as Dickens and Thackeray. While this book is highly recommended for medical history and large academic libraries, its scope may be too narrow for most public and college libraries, which should consider Porter's The Greatest Benefit to Mankind instead.?Eric D. Albright, Duke Medical Center Lib., Durham, NC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gout has a long tradition as the disease of high living--"just deserts for topers and gluttons," as Porter and Rousseau put it. Indeed, some sufferers saw it as a mark of their high social standing and wealth. But suffer they did; the 19th-century English essayist Sydney Smith said an attack of gout felt "like walking on my eyeballs." (The disease is marked by painful inflammation of the joints of the extremities, particularly the big toe) The authors' focus is on the cultural history of the disease. They present an abundance of quotations from sufferers (many of them famous men), physicians trying to treat the disease, and quacks offering cures, many of which strike the modern reader as bizarre. But the medical story of how the disease came to be understood and how effective treatments were found is here, too. One should not conclude, however, that gout is a bygone affliction. The "underlying trends are not encouraging, in view of the protein- and fat-rich diets now typical of Western populations." Moreover, the occurrence of gout is rising worldwide "as a consequence of the Westernization of diet and habits."

There are few diseases as easy to recognize as classic gouty podagra (from the Greek word meaning "foot seizure"). A gluttonous, bibulous, upper-class man suddenly notices a severely painful, swollen great toe. The attack passes after several days to several weeks, even without therapy. Hippocrates referred to gout (from the Latin gutta -- a drop) as the arthritis of the rich, as opposed to rheumatism, the arthritis of the poor. The list of sufferers throughout history includes important persons of power, prestige, and artistic accomplishment.

Roy Porter and G.S. Rousseau are professors of history and English, respectively. Their talents have combined to produce a scholarly account of the interactions among the disease, the sufferer, and the surrounding culture. This work contains much more detail than the history of gout by W.S.C. Copeman, a noted English rheumatologist, published in 1964 (A Short History of the Gout and the Rheumatic Diseases. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press). Interestingly, the dust jackets of both books are adorned with the famous cartoon by James Gillray showing an angry, fire-breathing creature whose teeth and claws dig deeply into the flesh of a swollen, red foot.

High-born sufferers from gout were frequently depicted as comic subjects by the bourgeois artists and writers of the day. The hereditary disease gout became a metaphor for social status (i.e., the hereditary titles, wealth, lands and estates of Britain in the 17th and, especially, 18th centuries). The disease was borne by the gentry as a badge of distinction. Moreover, the acute attacks were thought to rid the body of impurities. If aborted or thwarted, the impurity would be "misplaced" or become "retrocedent," attacking a vital organ and causing apoplexy (stroke), palsy (paralysis), or even death. It could become "atonic," causing melancholy, madness, or other neuropsychiatric problems. Charles Darwin's chronic illness was thought to be atonic gout.

As might be anticipated, the book is far stronger from the literary point of view (especially that of the British) than from the standpoint of medical science. The story of "sweet Willy O" provides a fascinating example. It appears that William Cadogan, a Welsh physician practicing in London, became the Dr. Spock of his time after his book on nursing and child care became a bestseller among the general public. A later book entitled A Dissertation on the Gout appeared in 1771 (Philadelphia: William and Thomas Bradford), causing great controversy by its assertion that gout was not inherited, periodic, or incurable. A physiologic puritan, Cadogan maintained that gout was acquired through laziness, gluttony, intemperance, and vexation -- that is, the sins of the titled and wealthy. The publication of his book, coinciding as it did with the restlessness and then rebellion of the American colonies, presented a challenge to the established order of things. Cadogan's method of treatment, which consisted of serious physical exercise combined with abstention from rich foods and spirits, was not what the rich and powerful wanted to hear about.

Porter and Rousseau accurately trace the scientific advances influencing the understanding of gout from Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's original description of crystals from a gouty tophus in the mid-17th century. An incredibly clever microscopist, van Leeuwenhoek did not know the composition of these crystals, since uric acid was first discovered in urine by the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in 1776, nearly 100 years later.

Despite Sir Alfred Baring Garrod's postulates in the mid-19th century implicating both an elevated level of uric acid in the blood of patients with gout and the deposition of crystals of sodium urate in the affected part, clinicians still asserted as late as 1959 that acute gout had nothing to do with uric acid. Hollander and I used compensated polarized-light microscopy in 1960 to show that the presence of crystals of sodium urate in synovial fluid was specific for the diagnosis of gouty inflammation. Later work by our group fulfilled Koch's postulates. Although these postulates were originally formulated by Robert Koch to implicate a specific microbe as the causal agent of a disease, we used them to implicate crystals of sodium urate as the cause of acute gouty arthritis.

Porter and Rousseau's history of gout omits the important contributions of the Swiss investigators Wilhelm His, Jr., and Max Freudweiler, whose work in 1901 clearly showed that urate crystals caused inflammation. Wilhelm Ebstein's finding of localized death of tissue (necrosis) as a primary event in gout was cited, but the criticism by His was ignored. Ebstein's fixatives for tissue dissolved the crystals, according to the Swiss workers. Although the authors mention the Methuen Treaty with Portugal in 1703, which resulted in the importation into England of large quantities of lead-laden fortified wine (port), inducing the "saturnine" gout, they fail to cite the work of Gene Ball, who showed that the lead content of bottles of port wine from that era was very high. (Ball subsequently drank the wine, which he said was delicious.)

Despite the virtual absence of any details of scientific advances related to gout or the metabolism of uric acid after Garrod's mid-19th-century work, I greatly enjoyed the book. No other disease could provide such reflections on the culture of the time. Porter and Rousseau analyze the interaction between gout and British culture brilliantly.

Reviewed by Daniel J. McCarty, M.D.

...in this fascinating general-interest study, Ray Porter and G.S. Rousseau examine the medical, cultural, and ethical history of an affliction long associated with outrageous upper-class overindulgence. -- The Boston Globe, Robert Taylor

This abundant, generous, somewhat repetitious and disorganized book is very good reading. -- The New York Times Book Review, Claude Rawson