The Aphorisms of Hippocrates
In the eyes of the pioneer priest-physician, the disorder was attributable to a retention of humours, and many of his dicta have stood the corroding test of time. He noted, like Sydenham, its tendency to periodicity, its liability to recur at spring and fall. Also that eunuchs are immune and youths also, ante usum veneris, while in females its incidence is usually delayed until after the menopause.
The curability of the disease in its earlier stages was affirmed, but that after the deposit of chalk in the joints it proved rebellious to treatment, which for him resided in purgation and the local application of cooling agents.
In the first and second centuries Celsus, Galen, and Aretæus the Cappadocian recounted their views as to its nature and therapy, while the Augustan poet in his Pontic epistles, like Hippocrates, laments that his gouty swellings defy the art of medicine.
“Tollere nodosam nescit medicina podogram.”
Ovid, Ep. ex Pont., I, 3, 23.
To Celsus, venesection at the onset of an attack seemed both curative and prophylactic. Corpulence of habit a state to be avoided, and conformably he prescribed frugality of fare and adequate exercise. Galen (130-200), more venturesome than his contemporaries, voiced his belief that tophi were compact of phlegm, blood, or bile, singly or in combination. For the rest, he enjoined bleeding and purgation and local applications, contravening, by the bye, Hippocrates’ claim as to the immunity of eunuchs in that in his (Galen’s) day their sloth and intemperance were such as readily begat the disorder.
About this period Lucian of Saramosta enumerated the various anti-gout nostrums vaunted as specifics in his day. Though in his comic poems, the Trago-podagra and Ocypus he rightly holds up to scorn the charlatanism rampant at the time, still it is quite clear that he possessed no mean knowledge of the clinical vagaries of gout and was quite alive to the mischief of too meddlesome treatment thereof.
Said the hero of the Trago-podagra:
“Irritantibus me
Soleo occupere multo iracundior
His vero qui cogitant nihil adversum mihi
Benignam adhibeo mentem, facilisque fio.”
Again, Seneca, in a jeremiad on the decadent habits of Roman ladies of the patrician order, observes: “The nature of women is not altered but their manner of living, for while they rival the men in every kind of licentiousness, they equal them too in their very bodily disorders. Why need we then be surprised at seeing so many of the female sex afflicted with gout.” That the old philosopher’s misgivings were but too well founded is obvious when we recall that so widespread were the ravages of gout among the Romans in the third century that Diocletian, by an edict, exempted from the public burdens those severely crippled thereby, in sooth a blatant illustration of political pandering to national vice.
But to return to the researches of physicians, those of Aretæus seem to have been the most enlightened of his time. A succinct account of the mode of invasion of gout and its centripetal spread in later stages to the larger joints is followed by enumeration of the exciting causes of outbreaks. Anent these, he quaintly notes the reluctance which the victims display to assigning the malady to its true cause—their own excesses—preferring to attribute it to a new shoe, a long walk, or an injury. Noting that men are more liable than women, he tells us, too, that between the gouty attacks the subject has even carried off the palm in the Olympic games. The white hellebore, to his mind, at any rate in early attacks, was the remedy par excellence. But, for the true nature of the disease, he, with humility and piety, avows that its secret origin is known only to the gods.
Not so his successor Cælius Aurelianus, who affirmed it to be not only hereditary but due to indigestion, over-drinking, debauchery, and exposure. Under their maleficent influence morbid humours were generated which sooner or later found a vent in one or other foot, with a predilection for tendons and ligaments; these structures he averred being the locus morbi. An abstemious dietary with exercise was his sheet anchor in therapy, with local scarification in preference to cupping and leeching, but violent purging and emetics he decried, and drugs to him made little appeal.
More ambitious than his predecessors, Alexander of Tralles, in the sixth century, held that there were many varieties of gout, some due to intra-articular effusions of blood, reminding us of Rieken’s view (1829) that hæmophilia is an anomalous variant of gout. Other cases, Alexander averred, were the outcome of extravasation of bile or other peccant fluids between tendons and ligaments. Abstinence, especially from wine and blood-forming foods, was enjoined and a plentiful use of drastic purgatives, elaterium, etc., with local sinapisms and blisters. For the absorption of chalk stones he commended unguents containing oil, turpentine, ammoniacum, dragon’s blood, and litharge.
Aetius, a contemporary, is noteworthy in that during the intervals of attacks he highly eulogised the use of friction while, like Alexander of Tralles, he seems to have been much impressed with the virtues of colchicum, of which he says, “Hermodactylon confestim minuit dolores.” Planchon, in 1855, in his treatise, “De hermodactes au point de vue botanique et pharmaceutique,” claims to have proved that the hermodactylon of the ancients was Colchicum variegatum, of similar properties to the Colchicum autumnale.
Paulus Ægineta, like most of his confrères, regarded gout and rheumatism as the same disorder, differing only in their location. He subscribed whole heartedly to the prevailing humoral theory, but inclined to think the site of the discharged humours was influenced by weakness or injury of the parts. He noted, too, that mental states, sorrow, anxiety, etc., might act as determining causes.
Nor will any historical résumé rest complete without a reference to the numerous works of the Arabian physicians—Avicenna, Rhazes, Serapion, and Haly Abbas—who one or other all maintained gout to be hereditary, rare in women and due to peccant humours, developed in the train of depletions, debaucheries, and the like.