Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough: The Medical Lives of Famous Writers

John J. Ross (St. Martin’s Press). For would-be writers, the provenance of Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough: The Medical Lives of Famous Writers is noteworthy. It began as a PowerPoint talk about syphilis for medical grand rounds. Infectious disease specialist John J. Ross wanted to enliven his presentation on genital infections with a few lines from Shakespeare. He noted, “I had a recollection from my undergraduate days that the Bard was fond of joking about the great pox. I dusted off my battered copy of the Riverside Shakespeare and started leafing through it. Holy crap, I thought, there is a lot of stuff here on syphilis.”

The book is medical literature — but a mixed genre. There’s definitely evidence cited, more than a few facts and some historical fiction. Ross serves up much delicious speculation, diagnostic puzzles, and a plethora of grotesque details about assorted physical and mental ailments that afflicted ten literary giants.

He begins with Shakespeare’s tremor and ends with Orwell’s bronchiectasis, and along the way, makes a case for Jonathan Swift’s dementia and describes “the many maladies of Herman Melville.” All the writers lived and died before the mid-twentieth century — effectively the beginning of the modern medical era. The chapters about Shakespeare and Orwell were first published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Ross’s energetic style and narrative structure are reminiscent of Max Haines, the syndicated newspaper columnist of “Crime Flashback.” Occasionally he drops into a plain English, doctor–teacher mode for the benefit of nonphysician readers. To be fair, Ross is more measured and less sensational in his storytelling than Haines; still, he’s fond of a hyperbolic turn of phrase, a scatological flourish or a juicy tidbit of sexual history.

In one paragraph he describes how Jonathan Swift’s father may have been infected by scabies: “a mite that chomps its way through the superficial layers of the skin, trailing eggs and feces as it goes.” In Ross’s view it may have been terminal scabies, as contemporary treatments for undifferentiated itching diseases often involved the application of mercury ointment. Mercury poisoning, we learn, can lead to “bad breath, rotten gums and uncontrolled drooling” — seldom fatal, but a nasty trio nevertheless, and perhaps a prelude to papa Swift’s mercury-induced renal failure.

Be prepared to have your eyes opened about “amateur M.D.” Jack London’s demise, and your biographical assumptions about the Brontë sisters questioned. “More claptrap has been written about the Brontës than any other group of English writers.” Thanks to tons of research and a lively prose style, Ross brings to life the persons wielding the pen. If you have your favourites among masterpieces like The Call of the Wild or Wuthering Heights, you likely will not read them in the same way again.