| View Larger Image | Gout | Paperbackby Dr. Roy Porter (Author), G. S. Rousseau (Author), Roy Porter G.S. Rousseau (Author)
| List Price: | $27.00 | |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Yale University Press | | Page Count: | 408 Pages | | Publication Date: | April 01, 2000 | | Sales Rank: | 1,072,306st |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Gout has interested medical writers and cultural commentators from the time of Ancient Greece. Historically seen as a disease afflicting upper-class males of superior wit, genius and creativity, it has included among its sufferers Erasmus, the Medici, Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson, Immanuel Kant and Robert Browning. Gout has also been the subject of medical folklore, viewed as a disease that protects its sufferers and assure long life. This book investigates the history of gout and through it offers a perspective on medical and social history, sex, prejudice and class and explains why gout was gender specific. The authors investigate medical thinking about gout through the ages, from Hippocrates and Galen through Paracelsus and Harvey to Archibald Garrod in the Victorian era and beyond. They discuss the cultural, moral, religious and personal qualities associated with gout, examining social commentary, personal writings, cartoons and visual arts, and imaginative literature (including novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Joseph Conrad). Weaving together all these threads, the authors provide a disease history that integrates the medical and the moral, the scientific and the humanistic, the verbal and the visual across a wide sweep of time. In an era in which we are interested by the ways that disease and health are represented by medicine and the media, an era in which the dialogue between patients and doctors over the naming and blaming of diseases is more intense than ever, this book offers an historical commnetary on many of our major concerns. |
Amazon.com Review
In their study of an ailment that has tormented the big toes of some big men--Kant, Samuel Johnson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson--Porter and Rousseau turn the argument of Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors on its head. Sontag thinks disease should be freed of its freight of cultural associations and stigmas. But disease and metaphor inevitably go hand in hand. This was especially true in the days when gout was mysterious, before Queen Victoria's future physician showed it was caused by uric-acid crystals producing excruciating pain in the extremities. Milton told a friend that if he were only free of gout pain, blindness would be tolerable. The pain felt "as if I was walking on my eyeballs," writes one sufferer. Since one had to be rich to live long enough to get gout, and most victims were males (many of whom drank port laced with gout-intensifying lead), it won a reputation as just punishment for high living, and even a kind of badge of meritocratic honor. It was God's gift to caricaturists like Hogarth, Cruikshank, and Gillray. George Eliot used gout as a symbol for a sick society in Middlemarch. The data fascinates, but the professors don't wear their learning lightly. Still, they do score some good phrases. Explaining that there aren't many portraits of gout sufferers because few victims would pose, they write, "Who wants to be remembered as a septuagenarian freak of Falstaffian glob?" --Tim Appelo |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 4 reviews)
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Was hoping for more... by Opera Director (New York, NY)  3 Stars
June 29, 2009
Many interesting points in this book, but it was all very disorganized, and all too often the most interesting moments were curtailed with a short "there's not enough space here to cover that." The language of the book is overbearingly pedantic to no great effect, obscuring rather than clarifying the arguments. On the other hand, the subject matter is fascinating, and if you sift through a lot of nonsense, you can get a great overview of how the concept of disease generally -- and one in particular -- works it way through history and culture.
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Gout by Maria Shugart (Calvert County,Maryland)  5 Stars
January 19, 2008
My son suffers from gout and this book explains many facts that some of us are unaware of.
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History, not Medicine by S. Austin (Santa Clara, CA, USA)  4 Stars
November 04, 2006
This was a very interesting book from a/an historical perspective. I would have liked more information on the disease pathology from a layperson's view.
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A fashionable ailment by A. Woodley (New Zealand) 4 Stars
January 09, 2001
This is the third review I have written on Socio-medical histories by Roy Porter. I read and reviewed this book, "Gout - the Patrician Malady" at the same time as his more general medical histories "Cambridge Illustrated History: Medicine" - and "The Greatest Benefit to Mankind". I wanted to compare these books with Porter's work on more specific topics. Porter mentions Gout in passing in both his general histories, but I wondered how he would deal with a more specific subject which had the space of an entire book to develop. He certainly brings the same light writing style to this book as he does to his other subjects and I it made fun reading for what at times could have been very dull and dry. Porter turns a medical subject into a very interesing social history, he overlays the historical recognition of Gout, its rise in prevalance and treatment, as well as the development of it as a fashionable, upper-class ailment very well. He does this by drawing in the literature and art of the times to track its social progress. Porter certainly shows himself a master of the subject. However, I didn't like the way he sectioned the book. It felt clumsy to me. It is in three parts Histories, Cultures and Goutometries and they seemed to overlap especially the last two sections. Although I did love the chapter on Art in 'Goutometries'. Perhaps the most interesting chapter for me was the in the 'Cultures' section "Indian Summer; Romantic and Victorian Gout" which traced the literary tradition against the actual social status of Gout through the nineteenth century using representations of Gout in Disraeli and Austen to George Eliot. The most amusing thing, I thought, was Gout as a symbol of social status - Gout was for the upper classes, and rather fashionable - and this resulted in many non-gout illnesses being diagnosed as Gout. At times I found the book rather long - but I rather think that was me rather than the writing. Most of my interest lies in the Georgian period which was really the peak of the Gout popularity. I wish it had been illustrated in colour too. The only illustrations at all were in the Goutometries and those were black reproductions on standard paper. The book probably has limited interest to most people - but for lovers of Georgian period or medical histories I think this is well worth reading.
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