The famous John Milton, author of "Paradise Lost," in addition to the total loss of sight was a great sufferer with gout, which stiffened and deformed his fingers. His well-known contemporary, the indus trious Samuel Pepys, was from early life a martyr to the stone and to visceral gout.
Not alone, hut perhaps most conspicuous among politicians, was the famous Lord Chatham, whose experiences with the protean forms of the disease have been so graphically described by Lecky in his " History of England during the Eighteenth Century." From the dawn of English history till the premiership of Lord Beaconsfield, there are few of the prominent men of Great Britain who have not contributed their share to the illustration of the clinical course of the disease. In this work the medical profession is not without honor, for it was the learned Svdenham whose thirty-four years of experience with the disease enabled him to compose that de scription of gout which had never been equalled, has never since been surpassed, and is still a medical classic. At the early age of sixty five his life was terminated by an acute attack of the disease with which he had so long contended.
As one reads the pages of history it is with painful interest that one remarks the manner in which many of the most precious lives were shortened and old age was tormented by the gout.
Allusion has been already made to the writings of Hippocrates. In his work " On the Prognostics" lie says : " With regard to persons afflicted with the gout, those who are aged, have tophi in their joints, who have led a hard life., and whose bowels are constipated, are be yond the power of medicine to cure.
And among the Aphorisms occur the following: "Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.
"A woman does not take the gout, unless her menses be stopped." But when Celsus and Galen wrote, in the days of the Cmsars, lux ury had risen to such a height that both women and eunuchs became bald and suffered with the gout. Hippocrates also notes the greater prevalence of gouty affections in spring and in autumn ; and it was his opinion that the inflammatory symptoms by which they were ac companied subsided in the course of forty days.
These ancient authors scarcely distinguished gout from rheu matism, and for this reason Sy denham and others have conjectured that gout was more prevalent in ancient times, while rheumatism was a comparatively modern disease. But the examination of the bodies
of the dead from the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum has resulted in the discovery of the articular lesions of chronic rheuma tism, thus proving a very respectable antiquity for that disease.
It is thought that Aretreus of Cappadocia, writing in the first cen tury, had some perception of the difference between the two diseases when he asserted that "Pain that is prevalent iu all the joints con stitutes arthritis; but pain in the foot is the characteristic symptom of what is called podagra." The same author appears to have been well informed regarding the etiology of the disorder, for he goes on to say : "The victims of the disease always ascribe it to a tight shoe, or to a long walk, or a blow, or some sort of pressure, but not one of them will acknowledge the real cause of his malady; and if you in form them that they have the gout, they pretend not to believe it." The most complete and graphic description of the gout that has reached us from the early years of the Christian era has been usually attributed to Clius Aurelianus, a Numidian physician who taught medicine in the city of Borne, about the close of the fourth 'century. He translated into Latin numerous volumes that had been composed in Greek by Soranus of Ephesus, a graduate of the medical school of Alexandria, and one of the most distinguished physicians in Rome during the reign of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian. His original works have been lost, and are only known by their translations, which have been often erroneously considered as the composition at first hand of their translator. Their real author was a fashionable obstetrician, and one of the immediate predecessors and rivals of Galen, yet he found time to become one of the most voluminous and highly esteemed medical writers of imperial Rome. His description of acute gout is as accurate and as vivid as the corresponding work of Sydenham. His companions and successors in the palmy days of the Alexandrian medical school were thoroughly familiar with the physiognomy of gout, and they endeavored to search out its remote causes, and to determine its pathogeny.