William Shakespeare(01 of10)
Open Image ModalThe only medical fact known about Shakespeare with certainty is that his final signatures show a pronounced tremor. Compared to other Elizabethan writers, Shakespeare had an unhealthy obsession with syphilis. D. H. Lawrence wrote, “I am convinced that some of Shakespeare’s horror and despair, in his tragedies, arose from the shock of his consciousness of syphilis.” According to contemporary gossip, Shakespeare was notoriously promiscuous. An obscure satire called Willobie His Avisa seems to suggest that Shakespeare was part of a love triangle in which all three parties had venereal disease. The standard Elizabethan treatment for syphilis was mercury; as the saying goes, “a night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury." Mercury’s more alarming side effects include hypersalivation, gingivitis, and tremor. Did Shakespeare’s writing career end because of adverse effects of mercury treatment? (credit:Wikimedia Commons )
John Milton(02 of10)
Open Image ModalMilton went blind in middle age, which he attributed to his propaganda work for the Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell. However, the more likely culprit was retinal detachment from severe myopia (Milton ruined his eyesight in childhood by staying up into the wee hours, reading the Greek and Latin classics). Milton is known to have “dabbled in physic,” or taken popular medicines of the day in a failed attempt to save his eyes. These may have included “mummy” (ground-up human bones), human sweat, cat-ointment, oil of puppies, and sugar of lead, the last of which may have ruined his kidneys and led to his gout. (credit:Wikimedia Commons)
Jonathan Swift(03 of10)
Open Image ModalSwift was a walking textbook of pathology. He suffered from Ménière’s disease, an inner ear condition that led to horrible bouts of vertigo and tinnitus, which he described as “a hundred oceans rolling in my ears.” His obsessive-compulsive disorder tanked his love life; James Joyce said that “he made a mess of two women’s lives." These were Stella Johnson, who may have been his secret wife in an unconsummated marriage, and the heiress Vanessa Vanhomrigh, who had a mad, futile passion for Swift. Swift had his most productive decade in his 50s, when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels and a great deal of smutty poetry. Swift’s subsequent behavior was increasingly bizarre. He may have had frontotemporal dementia, which in its early stages may be associated with increased creativity from loss of inhibitions. (credit:Wikimedia Commons )
The Brontë sisters (04 of10)
Open Image ModalAll six of the Brontë siblings died of tuberculosis, a Victorian plague that killed off 1% of the English population per year. TB entered the Brontë household after the older girls were infected at the Clergy Daughter’s School. This was the place made infamous by Charlotte as the brutal Lowood School in Jane Eyre, where the girls were beaten, starved, and terrorized by tales of hellfire and damnation. Although the consumptive artist is a tired cliché, there may be some truth in it. The immune system is weakened by emotional turmoil, of which the Brontës had plenty. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne had depressive episodes; brother Branwell had bipolar disorder and dipsomania; Emily, brainy and strange, probably also had Asperger’s syndrome and social anxiety disorder. (credit:Wikimedia Commons)
Nathaniel Hawthorne(05 of10)
Open Image ModalHawthorne suffered from pathologic shyness (social anxiety disorder). He hated to be touched, couldn’t make eye contact with people, and was known to dive into the bushes to avoid meeting strangers on walks. When his good friend Franklin Pierce was elected President, Hawthorne was appointed as the American Consul in Liverpool. Although this helped Hawthorne get rich, it was disastrous for his health. He came to rely on alcohol to get through social occasions and public speaking. Hawthorne died of a mysterious wasting illness. This was probably gastric cancer, once the most common cancer in America, due to the heavy consumption of carcinogenic salted cod and smoked meat in the era before refrigeration. (credit:Wikimedia Images )
Herman Melville(06 of10)
Open Image ModalMelville probable had bipolar disorder. Moby-Dick was written in a near-manic state of exhilaration, and he was prone to depression and alcoholism as he aged. He shattered his scapula in a freak riding accident, leading to post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD (data that emerged after 9/11 showed that bipolar patients are at higher risk for PTSD). Melville also had prominent physical symptoms, including disabling attacks of eye pain and low back pain, a rigid spine, and loss of height. Biographers have generally assumed that he suffered from psychosomatic illness, but his symptoms are more consistent with the autoimmune disease ankylosing spondylitis. (credit:Wikimedia Comons )
Jack London(07 of10)
Open Image ModalJack London’s manic self-confidence helped make him the first millionaire author in history, but it also proved to be his undoing. Jack indulged in reckless misadventures while in the grip of bipolar disorder, surviving scurvy in the Yukon, alcoholic binges, and a suicide attempt in the waters of San Francisco Bay. When he developed leg ulcers from the tropical disease yaws on a disastrous sailing cruise in the Pacific, he ruined his kidneys by self-medicating with mercury. He continued to act as his own doctor, using a silver hypodermic needle to inject himself with opium, heroin, belladonna, and strychnine. He died of a morphine overdose at 40, probably by accident. (credit:Wikimedia Commons )
William Butler Yeats(08 of10)
Open Image ModalYeats probably had Asperger’s syndrome. His awkwardness and eccentricity were legendary. He was fascinated with the occult, lost his virginity in middle age, and according to his wife, “had no interest in people as such, only in what they said or did.” Like many persons with Asperger’s, he had prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. He could not identify his own daughter, and once inadvertently lectured T. S. Eliot on the many defects of Eliot’s poetry. Yeats nearly died of brucellosis in 1929, but recovered thanks to shots of arsenic and horse serum. His brush with mortality inspired a quest to revive his sex drive, leading to a weird “rejuvenation” surgery. Gossips called him the “gland old man” and “a Cadillac engine in a Ford car.” (credit:Wikimedia Commons )
James Joyce(09 of10)
Open Image ModalJoyce described himself to Carl Jung as “A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism.” In 1904, young Joyce’s fondness for Dublin streetwalkers led to a case of “gleet,” or gonorrhea. His frenemy, Dr. Oliver Gogarty, directed him to a local specialist, who would have given Joyce state-of-the-art therapy: penile irrigation with a purple solution of potassium permanganate. Joyce’s gonorrhea was gone, but he soon developed terrible attacks of eye pain and arthritis. This may have been an autoimmune illness triggered by genital Chlamydia. Joyce suffered through 11 grueling eye surgeries. Afterwards, leeches were applied to drain the blood and reduce the swelling. Not surprisingly, he developed a horror of the scalpel. (credit:Wikimedia Commons )
George Orwell(10 of10)
Open Image ModalOrwell once wrote, "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness." This was literally true for Orwell. His health collapsed after writing Homage to Catalonia, and the heroic effort of writing and revising Nineteen Eighty-Four would kill him. Orwell was a “chesty” child. He had damaged bronchial tubes (bronchiectasis) from a bacterial infection in infancy. As an adult, he survived four episodes of pneumonia and a bullet through the neck, but succumbed to the tuberculosis acquired during his years of tramping, poverty, and vagabondage. Orwell underwent injections of air into his peritoneal cavity in a failed attempt to collapse the tuberculous lung, an ordeal that influenced the tortures of Winston Smith. (credit:Wikimedia Commons)