Word: scrofula
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...Francisco newspaper, and became a Republican-hating Democrat. Frost remembers his father as "a wild man" who gave him many a whipping, remembers eating many of his lunches in saloons while his father talked politics at the bar. Young Robert was nervous, could not sleep, suffered from biliousness and scrofula, was more often out of school than in. "I wasn't considered a very good bet," he says...
...Boswell's main, lifelong concern was always Dr. Johnson. Among the newly discovered pages of the Life is the record of his first impression of the Doctor: "... A man of most dreadful appearance . . . troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the King's evil [scrofula]." By 1772, nine years later, the new papers show, Boswell was writing Garrick that he was "determined" to write Johnson's life. He even interviewed a member of Johnson's household as to the Doctor's "amorous propensities...
Dogs and Dictionaries. Born (1709) "half-dead," infected with scrofula that almost ruined his eyes and disfigured him for life, Britain's future literary bull of Bashan was raised in the cathedral town of Lichfield, where his father was an impecunious bookseller. Moody, sensitive, strongwilled, young Sam was bitterly ashamed of his parents' struggle to make both ends meet. "Poor people's children," he insisted later, "never respect [their parents]: I did not respect my own mother, though I loved her: and one day, when in anger she called me a puppy, I asked if she knew what they called...
Visitors who flocked to see the now famous author were usually shocked by what they saw. "His appearance was very forbidding," said his stepdaughter, Lucy; "his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye . . '. the scars of the scrofula were deeply visible ... he often had convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, " sometimes "rolled himself about in a strange, ridiculous manner." He wore tattered wigs and filthy shirts ("I have no love for cleanliness"), let his stockings droop around his ankles, ate so gluttingly that his veins protruded and he sweated violently. He could drink 25 cups...
...Scrofula, in the middle ages, was called the King's Evil, because the touch of a royal finger, generally accompanied by the gift of gold coin bearing an angel's likeness, was supposed to cure that disease. But no textbook on pathology describes the ailment which Washingtonians sometimes refer to as ''the disease of Presidents." Neither gold coins nor Presidential touch cures it, for it is something that Presidents themselves contract. Last week as newshawks filed into a White House press conference they found Franklin Roosevelt looking rather brighter-eyed than usual. He began to talk...