Tag: gout
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The gout of the Medici
Florence in the fifteenth century was one of the most important cities in Western Europe. Rich and resplendent, first in banking and in the wool trade, it even issued its own currency, the golden florin, widely used throughout Europe. For some three hundred years the city was ruled almost continuously by the Medici, at one…
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Tom Jones Medical
In this great early English novel Henry Fielding describes several episodes that illustrate the way medicine was practiced in the days when doctors bled and purged their patients unconstrained by the shackles of evidence based medicine. The story begins with a country squire surprised to find in his bed “an infant wrapped in some coarse…
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William Pitt: Father and son
Two great political figures, William Pitt the Elder (later to become Lord Chatham) and William Pitt the Younger, shaped the destinies of Great Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century. The father was the main architect of England’s victory in the Seven Years War (in America the French-Indian War). The son became the youngest…
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Gout changes the fate of nations
In the battle of the Nicopolis, Bajazet defeated a confederate army of a hundred thousand Christians, who had proudly boasted that if the sky should fall they could uphold it on their lances. The far greater part was slain or driven into the Danube. . . . In the pride of victory Bajazet threatened that…