Tiny Tim from A christmas carol was supposedly based on contemporary illnesses of the time (so I’ve heard). At the time they didn’t know what they were, but the medical consensus seems to be he either had rickets or renal tubular acidosis. Both conditions were treatable at the time, even though I don’t think medicine understood what the diseases were.
King George may have had porphyria.
So what famous people had had serious illnesses in history, which at the time were unknown but which may be diagnosed today?
On top of that, what medical tools existed back then that could’ve treated the condition had people had medical knowhow, but no technology?
Example, both Mohammed and Caesar supposedly suffered from epilepsy. They had no medications available, but a ketogenic diet can help control epilepsy, and that was available back then. If Tiny Tim (were a real person) he could’ve treated his rickets by moving to a location with more sunshine.
Louisa May Alcott died of mercury poisoning, though they didn’t know what it was at the time.
She caught cholera in the soldiers’ hospital where she was working as a nurse during the Civil War, and was treated with a popular remedy at the time: calomel. Calomel had mercury as one of its ingredients, which was thought to control fever. It was only in later years that it was discovered that mercury was poisonous.
She was never well again after she recovered from cholera, and the mercury poisoning eventually killed her in her early fifties, after she suffered miserable pain for years and years.
There’s some evidence that Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning from the wallpaper at St. Helena; the green dye had a lot of it, and the damp weather would have put the arsenic into the air. It’s not conclusive, though, but it can’t be completely ruled out.
Does depression count? Lincoln was said to have it; talk therapy, if it had existed, would have been an available treatment in mid 19th century America.
Meriwether Lewis of Lewis & Clark is believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder (during his lifetime, he was known to suffer from “melancholy”). He died of a gunshot wound, which most people then and now believe was self-inflicted.
From the wallpaper? Really? The last thing I heard was they thought it was in his only-I-get-to-drink-this wine, because no one else in his household displayed the same symptoms (or died). Obviously, I’ve not been keeping up with the CTs.
The notorious bad mother Joan Crawford. Don’t have a cite readily available but I have read where more than one psychiatrist read her daughters’ tell-all book and posited that she may have had a bipolar disorder.
Stalin was likely poisoned (warfarin-rat poison), most likely by Lavrenti Beria. This was blamed upon some Jewish doctors.
Hitler is now thought to have been a tertiary syphilitic-this would explain his erratic behavior after 1941. Of course, his personal physician was also poisoning him with a weird cocktail of drugs, stimulants, and vitamins.
John F. Kennedy was also being given special injections of drugs by a quack doctor-he suffered from Addison’s disease, hyperthyroidism, and bone erosion.
I just finished reading The Princes in the Tower by Allison Weir, and she postulates, based on doctors’ examinations of the bones, that Edward V, the older prince, may have suffered from osteomyelitis of the jaw. Basically, inflammation and infection of the jaw bone.
It’s interesting to me, then, that she doesn’t chase down what seems to me to be an obvious conclusion: that due to depression, imprisonment, and the OM, Edward V maybe just died in the Tower. Maybe nobody - not Richard III, not Henry VII, not James Tyrrell - killed him, maybe he just died. Kids died all the time of all ailments back in the 1400s. This doesn’t make anyone (especially Richard III) less culpable in his death, mind - Richard III had him imprisoned and eventually dismissed nearly anyone from seeing him, and even if Edward V died naturally from his infection there’s still the problem that his younger brother, Richard Duke of York, probably was murdered as he’d still be a threat to any usuper’s crown. All that said, I find it something interesting - if ultimately rather pointless - to think on.
Given as history begins as soon as you type the word, I might suggest the interesting case of one Elvis Aaron Presley, a little known balladeer of the middle 20th century in the USA.
He was known as a popular entertainer of the era who died prematurely at the age of 42. Many attributed his demise at the time to the typical physical damage caused by extended use of prescription drugs. As it turns out, this poor guy from Tupelo, MS, suffered from a malady known as bowel paralysis. Mr. Presley’s autopsy showed that his colon was abnormally large (5" to 6" in girth instead of the more common 3" to 4" and a length of 8’ to 9’ compared to the average length of 3’ to 4’) and that this led to chronic constipation and eventually the death of this son of a ne’er-do-well father and a beloved mother.
Some of you may never have heard about this unheralded singer, but he was quite good for his time.