Word: gout
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Good Gout...
...gout. True enough, say Biochemist George Brooks and Social Psychologist Ernst Mueller, but the one-word diagnosis is far from complete. Those four famous men, along with many others, suffered from swollen, painful joints be cause their blood carried an excess of uric acid, which is a product of hu man metabolism. And the presence of that excess acid may explain their other basic similarities -their energetic and adventurous minds, their urge to ex cel and the high caliber of their achievement...
What all this means, say Brooks and Mueller, is that further study is necessary to check the possibility that uric acid serves as a stimulant to the higher cortical (reasoning) centers of the brain. The Ann Arbor observations also suggest that since a tendency to gout is inheritable, an aptitude for a high level of leadership and achievement may be inherited also. Gout is apparently as common as ever (20 times more common in men than in women), but it attracts much less attention nowadays because it can usually be controlled with drugs, such as colchicine and probenecid...
...very least, the researchers conclude, their findings indicate that "a tendency to gout is a tendency to the executive suite...
WHATEVER pleasures there had been in being a Renaissance man, the Flemish artist, Peter Paul Rubens, took them. Every afternoon he rode his Spanish thoroughbreds. He ate richly enough to die of gout, fathered eight children, dabbled sufficiently in diplomacy to be knighted by the King of England, and as a 53-year-old widower married a 16-year-old beauty. His love of life was so consuming that it was amazing that he had any time left in which to paint...