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Author: John J. Ross MD
ISBN : B007TJ19NC
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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 Shakespeare’s 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 Swift’s 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 Hawthorne’s sudden demise? Were Herman Melville’s 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. Yeats’s 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 Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s 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.
Direct download links available for Free Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough: The Medical Lives of Famous Writers [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 644 KB
- Print Length: 304 pages
- Publisher: St. Martin's Press (October 16, 2012)
- Sold by: Macmillan
- Language: English
- ASIN: B007TJ19NC
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #131,083 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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Free Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough: The Medical Lives of Famous Writers
If you enjoy mysteries, biographies, and history, you may be interested in "Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough," by Dr. John J. Ross, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. This book grew out of a presentation about syphilis that Ross made at a Boston teaching hospital, in which he incorporated a number of quotations from Shakespeare's plays. Ross was amazed at the number of times that Shakespeare alluded to "the pox" in his writings. Could the Bard have been afflicted with syphilis?
John Ross explores the history, literary output, and maladies of ten of the most celebrated writers in the English language: William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Charlotte Bronte (and her family), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Butler Yeats, Jack London, James Joyce, and George Orwell. Although this book is billed as non-fiction, Ross admits that some of his statements are pure conjecture. For example, we know very little about Shakespeare's health, other than that his handwriting in later years was unsteady. This narrative may be noteworthy not so much for Ross's speculation about his subjects' alleged ailments, but for his perspective on how these individuals dealt with such hardships as troubled childhoods, financial setbacks, marital problems, psychological disorders, and physical pain. It is horrifying to read about the primitive treatments used by incompetent physicians who not only failed to heal their patients, but in many cases administered substances that were injurious if not downright toxic.
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