[civsoc-mw] Once the Disease of Gluttonous Aristocrats, Gout Is Now Tormenting the Masses

[Tony Thontholani]

IT HAS COME for genius and aristocrat, conqueror and king. Like a succubus, it descends at night, first as a fevered dream, then pain in darkness, the body turned rude animal, reduced to its lowest, humblest extremity: the foot, red and swollen, throbbing like a heart. You are left to hobble, if that; the flutter of a bedsheet over the distended foot is anguish enough, let alone the full weight of the body bearing down. To take a step is to see the abyss. Often the pain is concentrated in the big toe, ridiculous, stubby and chubby, Napoleonic, the fat piggy sent to market. So acute is the sensitivity of this bloated hallux — “so exquisite and lively,” in the words of the 17th-century English physician Thomas Sydenham, chronicling his bouts with the disease — that the faintest footfall of a sympathetic visitor is a gunshot straight to the nerve. The American poet and novelist Jim Harrison, writing in 1991, likened his throes to those of “a wolf with the steel teeth of a trap buried in its paw.” It will not help, at such a moment, to recall that Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Henry James reportedly suffered thus, and that you have joined, in your abasement, the noblest ranks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/t-magazine/gout-tormenting-masses.html



-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://chambo3.sdnp.org.mw/pipermail/civsoc-mw/attachments/20201117/ac316458/attachment.htm>