A coming shower your shooting corns presage, Old aches will throb, your hollow tooth will rage. Swift.
Yet am I better Than one that’s sick o’ the gout, since he had rather Groan so in perpetuity, than be cur’d By the sure physician, death. Cymbeline, Act V., Sc. IV.
A rich man that hath not the gout. As You Like It, Act III., Sc. II.
His grace was rather pained With some slight, light, hereditary twinges Of gout, which rusts aristocratic hinges. Byron—Don Juan, Canto, XVI., Verse XXXIV.
It is a hard, although a common case, To find our children running restive—they In whom our brightest days we would retrace, Our little selves reform’d in finer clay; Just as old age is creeping on apace, And clouds come o’er the sunset of our day, They kindly leave us, though not quite alone, But in good company—the gout and stone. Byron—Don Juan, Canto III., Verse LIX.
Life’s thin thread ’s spun out Between the gaping heir and gnawing gout. Byron—Don Juan, Canto XIII., Verse XL.
Dear honest Ned is in the gout. Lies racked with pain, and you without: How patiently you hear him groan! How glad the case is not your own!
Yet should some neighbor feel a pain Just in the parts where I complain, How many a message would he send! What hearty prayers that I should mend! Inquire what regimen I kept? What gave me ease, and how I slept? And more lament when I was dead, Than all my snivellers round my bed. Swift—“Death of Dr. Swift.”
Diseases of the absorbent system are well represented by scrofula, or “King’s evil,” as it was known in Shakespeare’s time. This disease, so called on account of the supposed power of cure being invested in the handling and prayers of the king, was first so treated by Edward the Confessor, in 1058, and by all the succeeding rulers until William III., who refused. Queen Anne resumed the practice, but King George I. put an end to it. During the twenty years following 1662 upwards of 100,000 persons were touched for the malady.