So it went on until, alchemy being displaced by chemistry, uric acid was in 1775 discovered by Scheele, and in 1787 Wollaston established its existence in tophi, and to the further elaboration of our knowledge of this substance we shall allude later. Here we would only observe that Wollaston’s researches marked the coming substitution of the humoral and solidist theories by a chemical hypothesis as to the etiology of gout.
The “Honour of the Gout”
The absurd delusion, not wholly dissipated even to-day, that to have the gout, “Morbus Dominorum,” was highly creditable, a mark of good breeding, was firmly ingrained in our forefathers. We all recall the story of the old Scottish gentlewoman who would never allow that any but people of family could have bonâ fide gout. Let but the roturier aspire to this privilege, and she scouted the very idea—“Na, na, it is only my father and Lord Gallowa’ that have the regular gout.” As to the origin of this mistaken ambition, it most probably was the outcome of the fact that it was peculiarly an appanage of the great, the wealthy, and alas! those of intellectual distinction!
Statesmen, warriors, literary men and poets loom large amongst its victims. Lord Burleigh suffered greatly therefrom, and good Queen Bess on that account always bid him sit in her presence, and was wont to say, “My Lord, we make much of you, not for your bad legs, but for your good head!” With more humour, Horace Walpole complained, “If either my father or mother had had it I should not dislike it so much! I am herald enough to approve it, if descended genealogically, but it is an absolute upstart in me, and what is more provoking, I had trusted in my great abstinence for keeping it from me, but thus it is!”[3]
Of warriors, Lord Howe, Marshal Saxe, Wallenstein, and Condé were among its victims; while of literary men and poets thus afflicted may be mentioned Milton, Dryden, Congreve, Linnæus, Newton, and Fielding. Of physicians, the great Harvey was a martyr to gout, and was wont to treat it after the following heroic fashion. Sitting, in the coldest weather, with bare legs on the leads of Cockaine House, he would immerse them in a pail of water until he nearly collapsed from cold. Mrs. Hunter, wife of John Hunter, in a letter to Edward Jenner about her distinguished husband, dated Bath, September 18th, 1785, laments that “He has been tormented with the flying gout since last March!” In short, the disorder, with a notable frequency, figures in the life history of some of the ablest men in all ages, hence the complacency with which lesser men, often without good reason, affect to have the gout.
“But nothing,” as Sir Thomas Watson says, “can show more strongly the power of fashion than this desire to be thought to possess, not only the tone and manners of the higher orders of society, not their follies merely and pleasant vices, but their very pains and aches, their bodily imperfections and infirmities. All this is more than sufficiently ludicrous and lamentable, but so it is. Even the philosophic Sydenham consoled himself under the sufferings of the gout with the reflection that it destroys more rich men than poor, more wise men than fools.”
“At vero (quod mihi aliisque licet, tam fortunæ quam Ingenii dotibus mediocriter instructis, hoc morbo laborantibus solatio esse possit) ita vixerunt atque ita tandem mortem obierunt magni Reges, Dynastæ, exercituum classiumque Duces, Philosophi, aliique his similes haud pauci.
“Verbo dicam, articularis hicce morbus (quod vix de quovis alio adfirmaveris) divites plures interemit quam pauperes, plures sapientes quam fatuos.”
The Scotch at one time regarded gout as fit and meet punishment for the luxurious living of the English. But, as was pointed out, the cogency of the moral was somewhat spoilt by the fact that the disorder was found to exist even among the poor and temperate Faroe Islanders. In truth, although “the taint may be hereditary, it may be generated by a low diet and abstinence carried to extremes.”