Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough by John J. Ross

Yeats's doctors dose him with toxic amounts of arsenic? Did James Joyce need several horrific eye operations because of a strange autoimmune disease acquired from a Dublin streetwalker? Did writing Nineteen Eighty-Four actually kill George Orwell? The Bard meets House, M.D. Were Shakespeare's shaky handwriting, his obsession with venereal disease, and his premature retirement connected? Did John Milton go blind from his propaganda work for the Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell, as he believed, or did he have a rare and devastating complication of a very common eye problem? Did Jonathan Swift's preoccupation with sex and filth result from a neurological condition that might also explain his late-life surge in creativity? What Victorian plague wiped out the entire Brontë family? What was the cause of Nathaniel Hawthorne's sudden demise? Were Herman Melville's disabling attacks of eye and back pain the product of 'nervous affections,' as his family and physicians believed, or did he actually have a malady that was unknown to medical science until well after his death? Was Jack London a suicide, or was his death the product of a series of self-induced medical misadventures? Why did W. Yet desperate diseases called for desperate remedies, of course. The doctor warned of minor side effects: uncontrolled drooling, fetid breath, bloody gums, shakes and palsies. In a soothing, urbane voice, the physician explained the treatment: stewed prunes to evacuate the bowels succulent meats to ease digestion cinnabar and the sweating tub to cleanse the disease from the skin. Though he smiled reassuringly, the poet noticed that he kept a safe distance.

He was sleek and prosperous, with a dainty goatee. The doctor suddenly appeared beside Will, startling him.

Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough by John J. Ross