Political gout: dissolute patients, deceitful physicians, and other blue devils

Abstract

This essay seeks to assess the renegade Thomas Beddoes through the filter of the gout diagnosis in his time. It stretches out to cover his whole life and emphasizes the need for a broad comparative historical and biographical approach. Gout is shown to have functioned then as more than a malady; it was also part of a social code embedding class, rank, affiliation, standing and political position.

Gout

“…Gout has been recognised since antiquity, and has been referred to as the ‘King of diseases’ by Richette and Bardin (2010); the ‘Disease of kings’ by Dubow (2003), or ‘Rich man’s disease’ as in the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine (2008). In his article ‘Political gout’, Rousseau (2009) states that one publication from the 1730s listed 61 different types of gout, including galloping gouts, flying gouts, complicated gouts, regular gouts, irregular gouts, and atonic gouts. Doctors considered these to be random events, but because of the connection with rich foods and fine wine they were also seen as a mark of high social class.…”

Listening to illness: hearing gout through music

“…One such example is the "The Gout" (fig 1), a satirical etching by the artist James Gillray (1756-1815). 4 But the medium of music, with its unique way of communicating with the cognitive, emotional, sensory, and even motor aspects of the human psyche, 5 is arguably an under-recognised means of appreciating the manifestations of illness.…”

Dr Thomas Beddoes and the Politics of the Imagination

“…S. Rousseau notes that he 'was the creature who struck [...] his contemporaries as an oddity they could not explain: the imaginative physician whose visionary enthusiasm and radical politics combined to cast severe doubt on his science'. 2 Rousseau, like Beddoes's obituarist, suggests that the 'visionary' qualities of his imagination were anathema to the empirical demands of scientific enquiry and made him vulnerable to charges of dilettantism. However, although his inclusive approach to intellectual enquiry and political engagement drew criticism, Beddoes continued to assert that the imagination could effect beneficial change.…”