Word: gout
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...still-smarting convalescent from the occupational disease of British Prime Ministers was Britain's Prime Minister last week. Hobbling gingerly after his first bout of gout (podagra) in 18 months, Neville Chamberlain presided over a Cabinet meeting, his left foot swathed in an enormous flannel boot. Outside, London was whistling the newest hit tune: God Bless You, Mr. Chamberlain. What consolation he could the Prime Minister took from echoes of this ditty and from the list of his distinguished gouty predecessors: Derby, Disraeli, Palmerston, Melbourne, Canning, the Pitts.-Several of these statesmen courted gout by stuffing themselves with mutton...
...kisses at the ceiling, and at the end of the first movement the audience cheered. Marcel Tabuteau grinned uneasily, but he did not rise to acknowledge the applause. When it was all over he boosted himself out of his chair and hobbled off the stage. Marcel Tabuteau had the gout. For two weeks, on tour, he had been traveling in wheel chairs, ambulances, on crutches, in the arms of his fellow orchestra musicians. For the Philadelphia Orchestra without Marcel Tabuteau would be like soup without salt...
Marcel Tabuteau did not so much mind the gout itself as the fact that it keeps him from his favorite occupation: eating. For Marcel Tabuteau is not only Philadelphia's first oboe player, he is also Philadelphia's most spectacular gourmand. "For two weeks I am on a milk diet!" he exploded. "Do you know what that is like? The hunger, it does not leave me. Whatever I do, wherever I go, it is like something I cannot take off. To me the cooking and eating are arts as great as music-maybe greater. One more week...
...nightfall in 1744 after a 15-month voyage from London, he found India a "battered caravanserai." Its warring kinglets misruled some 90 distinct peoples whose languages were Babel. Its climate was hotter than its curry. Its diseases were "consumptions, fluxes, fevers, cholera, scurvy, berbers (a kind of paralysis), smallpox, gout, the stone, prickly heat, tetters or worms...
...Baltimore Stin's Henry Mencken, who was disillusioned long ago. Noting the widespread pain of the pinks, he opined: "The will to believe is not cured by a single sellout, nor even by a dozen on end. It is a chronic affliction, and as intractable as gout, the liquor habit, or following the horses. The American pinks have had it for a long time and they will carry it to the grave, and even let us hope, beyond...