Disease of Distinction Full Article (PDF)
by Stephan A. Schwartz
Excerpt:
Diseases have historically significant golden ages. Polio with the 1950s, Malaria with the pening of the Western Hemisphere are two examples. For gout, because effective treatment took so long to develop, there are several peak periods, the last of which is in many ways the most interesting — the 17th and 18th centuries. And the reason is the role the disease played in America’s founding.
John Locke, England’s leading empiricist philosopher and an amateur physician, was in many ways the spiritual father of the American Revolution. His philosophical writings center on human rights, and influenced virtually every major figure involved in our nation’s founding. Locke pursued medicine as avidly as philosophy, and his medical notebooks abound with observations about gout. Like many of his spiritual children in the American Revolution, he suffered gout attacks throughout his adult life.
Franklin, the only person to sign all three founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and the Constitution in 1787 was a severe gout sufferer, and had to be carried in a sedan chair to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia by convicts.
