An Alarming History Of Famous And Difficult! Patients: Amusing Medical Anecdotes From Typhoid Mary To FDR

by Richard Gordon

When the flesh is weak, the spirit often reacts in an unusual way. Some memorable people have become difficult patients for their doctors, as well as demanding companions for their loved ones, and intolerable colleagues to their contemporaries. The course of history has frequently been altered by their ailments. Presented in the witty and erudite style that is Richard Gordon's hallmark are thirty-one cases of maladies and malingerers, among them: At Waterloo, Napoleon was incommoded with prolapsed piles, hardly the strategical equivalent of Nelson's blind eye at Copenhagen; A mortally ill King Charles II was offered a bracing Julep with forty drops of Spirit of Human Skull, which soon sped him on his way to a more heavenly kingdom; Hitler took laxatives and gave himself camomile enemas to lose weight (a mystical German leader could not be potbellied); and Dissatisfied with his medical advisers, Stalin ordered nine doctors thrown into chains, beaten to a pulp, and ground into powder - a most difficult patient indeed.

Genres: Medical, History

Hardcover

First published March 1, 1997

About the author

Richard Gordon is the pen name used by Gordon Ostlere (born Gordon Stanley Ostlere on September 15, 1921), an English surgeon and anaesthetist. As Richard Gordon, Ostlere has written several novels, screenplays for film and television and accounts of popular history, mostly dealing with the practice of medicine. He is most famous for a long series of comic novels on a medical theme starting with Doctor in the House, and the subsequent film, television and stage adaptations. His The Alarming History of Medicine was published in 1993, and he followed this with The Alarming History of Sex.

Gordon worked as anaesthetist at St. Bartholomew's Hospital (where he was a medical student) and later as a ship's surgeon and as assistant editor of the British Medical Journal. He has published several technical books under his own name including Anaesthetics for Medical Students(1949); later published as Ostlere and Bryce-Smith's Anaesthetics for Medical Students in 1989, Anaesthetics and the Patient (1949) and Trichlorethylene Anaesthesia (1953). In 1952, he left medical practice and took up writing full time. He has an uncredited role as an anesthesiologist in the movie Doctor in the House.

The early Doctor novels, set in the fictitious St Swithin's, a teaching hospital in London, were initially witty and apparently autobiographical; later books included more sexual innuendo and farce. The novels were very successful in Britain in Penguin paperback during the 1960s and 1970s. Richard Gordon also contributed to Punch magazine and has published books on medicine, gardening, fishing and cricket.

The film adaptation of Doctor in the House was released in 1954, two years after the book, while Doctor at Sea came out the following year with Brigitte Bardot. Dirk Bogarde starred as Dr. Simon Sparrow in both. The later spin-off TV series were often written by other well-known British comic performers.

Reviews

[Susan Olesen · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Gordon has a dry and entertaining wit, there is not enough of it to save this book. A collection of anecdotes about various famous people in history and their maladies, there just isn't enough cohesive information to make this interesting. Sometimes it is (Samuel Pepys had a kidney/bladder stone the size of a tennis ball removed WITHOUT anesthesia) and too often it isn't (Florence Nightingale didn't really have any medical issues besides a hysterical personality that was very good at making other people do her bidding; Walt Whitman made a decent nurse in the Civil War and was fascinated by anatomy).

Some of these are mildly interesting, some are just conjecture. It's got some nice history in there you don't often see in books, but there's just not enough of the good stuff to keep me interested, and I was very glad to finish the book.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

There have been difficult patients for as long as there have been doctors, and this book seeks to take a closer look at 31 of the most famous of them.

I went into this book with high hopes as I'd always been fond of trivia and interesting anecdotes. Several days later saw me at only 2/3rds through it when I realized I, oddly enough, hadn't finished it in a day. I had fallen into the habit of reading a few entries and putting it down to start and finish another book instead. While I could allow myself to shrug off this behaviour as understandable as it's this exact reason why I adore books broken into individual entries, I realized it was for another reason. If I could start and finish the interesting but tiresome (no dialogue sadly equating large blocky paragraphs often surpassing a page long) The Fox and the Hound in a day, then the only other reason I couldn't seem to polish this one off had to be that it was too educational.

The book reads like a series of medical files taken right from the doctor's office. Which many must have been, otherwise the rattling off of complaints wouldn't make much sense. Each entry tends to focus on one particular case at some point in the person's life, then adds in a few other well known problems they faced up to their deaths, then word vomits their entire medical history at you.

I'm sure it would be interesting to a medical or biology student, but not so much for the casual reader.

We often get a glimpse of a clever wit on the part of the author, usually in cases where a doctor proclaims a patient about to die and patient immediately recovers, or something regarding their manner of death, but these are too rare among the hard-packed dry facts. The entry on Typhoid Mary was lovely as it was the only compilation article I'd read so far that didn't skip over her release and rearrest (though it didn't go so far as to explain its abrupt accusation of her role causing a 1903 outbreak that killed 1400), and also made mention of her famous temper in one of the rare witty bits that managed to startle a laugh out of me.

Dr. Soper explained to her patiently in the Park Avenue kitchen that she was unfortunately confirming the latest microbial theory: that the typhoid which so puzzled her as she shifted from job to job was spread by herself. She responded by attacking him with a kitchen cleaver.
(Richard Gordon, An Alarming History of Famous (and Difficult!) Patients, p.200)

And the entry for Sherlock Holmes was a treat, as I'd expected it to be about his rampant cocaine addiction but was delighted to discover instead an nod to The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (wherein his addiction caused Holmes to have feverish delusions he believed to be real). In this case Holmes is deemed a sufferer of obsessional neurosis and all his adventures are fabrications of his own imagination.


THE VERDICT? Don't bother. Unless you're dying to know about Washington's dental history or James Boswell's almost comical relationship with gonorrhoea, it has nothing for you.