Word: ober
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BOSWELL'S CLAP AND OTHER ESSAYS by William B. Ober...
...sweeten adversity, Shakespeare played up the toad's jeweled eye rather than its warts and bloat. Dr. William Ober, a Boston-born pathologist with an 18th century prose style and a tart Yankee wit, would rather dissect the toad. The eye looks out for itself; the rude and frequently ugly support systems of truth and beauty need all the help they can get. There is, of course, a long history of the artist as freak and invalid: Plato's ideas of divine mania; Philoctetes, the archer of Greek mythology, whose festering wounds made him unfit company; 19th century...
Perhaps because he earns his living examining diseased tissue at a Hackensack, N.J., hospital. Dr. Ober, 59, is less inclined to turn pathology into poetry. But he is certainly interested in how others did it. His collection of essays, subtitled Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions, balances biographical and clinical evidence with psychological speculation and common sense. "We do not test the consecrated wine for hemoglobin content, nor would Careme's recipe for a madeleine give us insight into the workings of Proust's imagination " he writes. "But literature is often a transformation of experience...
Some examples are clearer than others. Keats enjoyed an occasional draft of opium, and, Dr. Ober points out, his imagery can be pharmacologically explicit ("My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains . ."). Restoration Poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, enshrined his premature ejaculations in The Imperfect Enjoyment. The disorder, Ober suggests may have been caused by confusion and guilt: the earl was bisexual...
...think it's a great trade," said Cliff Keane of the Boston Herald-American as he popped the top off a beer and sat down at a table with some other sportswriters and Red Sox coaches. "Locke-Ober South," the food-and-drink bar set up in the press lounge, was keeping the sportswriters all juiced...