Word: gout
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Burdened though he may be by sciatica, gout, and the cumulative fatigue of the 85 years he had come to celebrate, the feisty little guest of honor stole the show. So forcefully did he define his profession and the practices and crusades of his own turbulent lifetime, that even men who had long opposed him stood to cheer...
...pain of practically any kind from hangover to cancer. In the rheumatic disorders, aspirin has a double action: it not only eases pain but, by lowering the temperature of inflamed joints and muscles, actually helps to check the disease process itself. It has a similar double action in gout. Aspirin's supremacy as an antirheumatic was threatened for a while after the hormones cortisone and ACTH appeared in 1949, but it is once again "the drug of choice," except in special cases where doctors find the risks of the hor mones' side effects are justified...
...entertained his mistress there; Pitt happily tippled his port on the premises; and Disraeli penned his Endymion between parliamentary debates. But seven P.M.s refused to live in No. 10's cramped quarters; between 1847 and 1877, it was completely untenanted, and then Disraeli moved in only because his gout made the trip to his office too painful. During the blitz, Churchill disconcertingly called No. 10 "shaky" and encouraged scads of cats to prowl the place to keep down the rats...
...hole cut in the table to accommodate him at meals. "A fool," the doctor used to say to Anna, "is a man who never tried an experiment." Erasmus tried them all the time, and occasionally they worked. He prescribed electric shock for jaundice and scarlet fever, purges for the gout, blood transfusions for cases of consumption. His "Commonplace Book" is full of case histories of experiments that failed: a dropsical woman who apparently vomited and died after receiving four doses of "decoction of foxglove"; his own infant daughter who died after Erasmus tried to inoculate her against measles...
...more proof that gout is not, as was once supposed, simply the result of high living. In starvation, the kidneys do not clear enough uric acid, which accumulates in the blood, may then crystallize to cause the anguish of gout...