How Isaac Newton Lost His Marbles And more medical mysteries, marvels: a nd mayhem

By Jim Leavesley and George Biro

After their successful book speculating on What Killed Jane Austen, Dr Jim Leavesley and Dr George Biro turn their attention to How Isaac Newton Lost His Marbles and more medical mysteries. the life and death of this hypochondriac scientist is just one of over 50 intriguing stories of famous patients, doctors, medical experiments, disasters and triumphs.● Why did Byron refuse dinner invitations?● Why did Laurence Olivier need steroids?● What troubled Don Bradman?● How can you be murdered with an umbrella?● Have you heard of the bizarre Stockholm Syndrome?● What is the story behind Vivien Leigh's mental state?● Why would you want a monkey gland injection?● What inspired Dicken's concern for crippled children?● Did a medical mistake cause World War I?these are just a few cases over which the authors cast a jaundiced eye and perform a clinical and historical checkup. this latest collection tells you more than you ever needed to know about many famous figures and medical marvels. It is bound to satisfy the most morbid curiosity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Oct 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730492412

Jim Leavesley

Jim Leavesley was born and educated in the northern England seaside holiday resort of Blackpool. He graduated from Liverpool in medicine in 1953 and emigrated to Western Australia in 1957. After 33 years in general practice he and his wife Margaret retired to the vine growing area of Margaret River in the south west of the State. Here he rekindled an earlier love for history, especially the medical history of famous people, and took up the much more chancy occupation of writing about the subject. During the previous 10 years he had written a fortnightly column for the medical newspaper, Australian Doctor, but now he enlarged his horizon. Between 1978 and 1986 and while still in active practice, he did a weekly medical talk back programme on West Australian local radio. From 1986 to date he has presented a weekly medical history segment on the radio and has been an irregular guest speaker on the Science Programmes of ABC National Radio . Out of these presentations have been published 5 books. In 1998 he teamed up with Dr George Biro and together they have written 3 books on medical history; What Killed Jane Austen, How Isaac Newton Lost His Marbles and Flies in the Ointment. In 1993 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for 'services to medicine in general and medical history in particular'.

Book preview

Chapter 1

MEDICINE AND THE ARTS

EUNUCHS, CASTRATI AND THE LIKE

The last of the grand ‘castrato’ singers, Alessendro Moreschi, died as recently as 1922. In his time he was known as ‘The Angel of Rome’ and there still exists a recording of his unique voice. It was made in 1902, a year before the Pope banned that surgical whimsy which for three centuries had been performed on prepubescent boys so that they could maintain the high notes for years longer than nature intended.

Regrettably, the voice of Moreschi comes to us as being thin and tremulous, quite unlike those of former operatic maestros whose pristine quality had the audience standing at the end of an aria shouting, ‘Long live the Knife!’.

Together, Italians and the Roman Catholic Church have loved music from earliest times. Centuries ago in Venice, foundlings were left at a church door. They were accommodated (or ‘conserved’) next door at the ‘Conservatory’ where they were given succour, shelter and musical training. Frustratingly, just as a boy became skilled his voice broke. So in about 1600 it was decided that to preserve the purity and marketability of a young boy’s voice, castration was in order.

You may recall from your childhood science classes that the longer a cord, the deeper the note it emits when plucked. The idea of castration was that if you stop the flow of the male hormone the larynx remains undeveloped, so the vocal cords do not lengthen in the normal way and the notes emitted would maintain their clear, high pitch for ever.

Many died during the crude procedure, and of those who survived, only about 1 per cent finished up with the spectacular, pristine voice necessary to become an international star. As these men were highly paid, downtrodden families saw it as a way to escape their penury, so many packed off their sons to be ‘fixed up’. The big centre for doing the operation was Norcia, well away from Rome. The surgeons were highly paid and well respected. Besides stunting the larynx, the procedure allowed the chest to become more powerful, the limbs longer and there to be a female distribution of body fat. Indeed, in opera they commonly took female parts. Paradoxically, if performing as a male, they displayed a higher pitched and stronger voice than the women they were supposed to be seducing.

Until the late eighteenth century the only opera of consequence was Italian, and it was there the idolised castrati sang their elaborate arias. Some of the musical greats wrote for them, including Mozart and Handel. Hogarth represented them in his series of paintings called ‘The Rakes Progress’.

If they did not succeed on the stage, they went into the choir to swell the volume of the songs of praise for years. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, the Vatican had 16 castrati still in its choir.

Perhaps the greatest of them all was Carlo Broschi, better known as Farinelli (1705—1782). He appeared before rapturous audiences throughout Europe until he was headhunted by the Spanish. There he sang to an audience of one, Philip V. The King was a chronic depressive and only comforted, it seems, by the Italians dulcet tones. The singer’s room was next to the monarch’s, and incredibly, he sang to him every night for nine years. More incredibly still, he always sang one of only four arias.

As it turned out, many of the castrati were neither impotent nor sterile. In 1667 a chorister married. This outraged the Church which made him swear to maintain only a platonic relationship. In 1685 he wrote a book, fittingly called The Capon Marriage, and he is said to have died of a broken heart.

Another famous castrato singer by the name of Tenducci fathered two children, maintaining that originally he had three testicles and one escaped at the time of the operation!

But tastes change, and the rise of the comic opera, especially those of Rossini, saw the beginning of the end for these men.

Castration was practised in the Orient and Turkey for centuries where either the whole genitalia (true castrati), or just testes (spadones) were removed or crushed (thlibiae). From 1100 BC in China it was used not only to attain musical perfection, but also as a punitive measure. In its heyday the Emperor had 3000 eunuchs serving as slaves in his palace. The practice continued into the early part of the twentieth century. In fact, the last Chinese eunuch from the days of the Forbidden City died as recently as 1997.

In the Turkish Empire most of the boys were operated on at a Coptic Monastery in upper Egypt. If successful, they became guardians in the Harem where equivocal surgical results made them popular with their charges. However, the death rate from the procedure was high, healing tedious, and contractures common.

Intellect, however, was never impaired, as seen in the famous story of Abelard (1079—1142). Despite having his genitals struck off after seducing Heloise, niece of a canon of Notre-Dame, he went on to become one of the greatest scholars of his time. This century, Sir Edward Marsh, rendered eunuchoid by severe mumps as a child, was Winston Churchill’s secretary for 23 years.

Several pagan religions have had their goddesses attended by eunuch priests. The best known was a Roman sect associated with Cybele. In a fit of pique her lover, Attis, had castrated himself, so after that the wandering mendicants who worshipped her were castrated to ensure purity. Her Spring festival incited such throbbing fervour that young men are said to have castrated themselves on the spot with a thoughtfully provided sword. They then ran through the streets brandishing aloft their bloody handiwork. A clamp found below London Bridge in 1840 is thought to have been used in Cybele rites. It was the epoch-making Council of Nicaea in 325 AD that stopped castration in the priesthood.

Worldwide, castration now seems to be a thing of the past. But as recently as 1890 there sat at the gates of Peking a raddled old crone who purveyed her arcane skill by removing penis, testes, scrotum — the complete set — with one blow of a sword. The position was hereditary and provided eunuchs for the Emperor and sweaty palms for the lads of the village.

I think we had better stop there. I am beginning to feel queasy.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE CRIPPLE

As a boy in the 1930s and 40s I lived in Blackpool, a seaside holiday resort on the north-west coast of England, made famous by Stanley Holloway’s (Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady) monologue about Albert and the Lion. To quote him, it was a place of ‘fresh air and fun’. And so it was. Built in some of the more exposed and breezy spots were homes for sick or convalescent children who were brought there to be cheered up and to get over their chronic ill-health in the bracing seaside climate.

In truth, these homes were a legacy of the collective conscience of Victorian Britain which had first been pricked by Charles Dickens’ novels, a number of which were concerned with the plight of sick and deprived children.

In the mid-nineteenth century the majority of such waifs suffered from tuberculosis, usually of the joints, particularly the spine and hip. The disease itself was very common in the population at large and easily passed on in the crowded conditions in which most lived, especially in the north of England which comprised Blackpool’s hinterland. The malady had a high mortality rate, but those who survived childhood did so to become part of a society which generally regarded the lame with suspicion, if not revulsion. This prejudice was age-old as seen, for instance, in the loathing which Shakespeare’s Richard III and Victor Hugo’s hunchback Quasimodo attracted.

But then in the middle of the last century Charles Dickens, novelist and social reformer, became interested in the circumstances of these unfortunates and wrote of them in a sympathetic, caring and deserving light.

His interest seems to have dated from 1837 when he took a summer cottage at Broadstairs in Kent, on the south coast of England. Just along the coast at Margate was the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital, built in 1791 to provide sea air for the sick of London who in the normal course of events could never have afforded a holiday. It is still there and said to be the oldest orthopaedic hospital in the world.

While at Broadstairs, the author planned his book Nicholas Nickleby (published in 1839). In Chapter XL Nicholas notices some flowers in the attic window of a tenement. On inquiry he finds that a ‘sickly, hump-backed boy on tiny crutches’ lived there and the flowers were his only pleasure. The boy slowly died in a squalor which was in significant contrast to the surroundings of the gypsy children he wrote about in the next chapter. They lived in the sun and their limbs were ‘free and not crippled by distortion’.

Two years after completing Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens’ infant nephew, Harry Burnett, developed a kyphosis (a humping of the upper back due to collapse of the vertebrae and at this time usually due to TB) and was sent to Brighton for the air. His mother died of consumption shortly after and the boy followed her to the grave at the age of nine — not an altogether uncommon story of the era.

The author was grief-stricken, which is reflected in his book Dombey and Son (written 1846—1848). The child, Paul Dombey, has a painful back and is sent to the seaside to recover. He initially improves, but later dies. Dickens’ readers loved this kind of pathos and doubtless there was barely a dry eye in the parlour.

At the time Britain did not have a single children’s hospital. Not until three years later, in 1852, was Great Ormond Street Hospital in London opened. Even then a lack of patients and money almost led to its early closure, for the public were suspicious of workhouse infirmaries and the like. Dickens responded by mentioning the hospital in his novel Our Mutual Friend (published in 1865) and in the magazine Household Words, which he edited. He also raised £2000 from public readings of his perennial favourite, A Christmas Carol, which had first appeared in 1843.

Dickens’ (perhaps the world’s) most famous cripple, Tiny Tim, was, of course, in this latter book. The sentiments expressed in it immediately entered the general consciousness of the population. Generations of readers have sobbed themselves to sleep as they read either how Tim sat close to his father who ‘held his withered little hand in his … and dreaded that he might be taken from him’, or at how the ghost of Christmas Present could see a vacant seat and ‘a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved’. Dickens’ contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray, called the book ‘a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it, a personal kindness’.

In the book Dickens highlighted the link between poverty and disease, and it was A Christmas Carol which finally awakened the national understanding to a problem it had studiously ignored.

During the last decade of his life Dickens devoted much of his time to readings of his works. One of his listeners was the carpet manufacturer, William Treloar, who heard the tale of Tiny Tim and was inspired to devote his life to crippled children. He went on to become the Lord Mayor of London and opened a very successful fund to provide hospitals and holiday homes for them.

After the death of Charles Dickens in 1870 other novelists kept up the pace and the rage until by around the turn of the century attitudes were reversed and concern about these forlorn sufferers became a major philanthropic activity, especially among the socially advantaged. The financially well-off vied with each other to prove their benevolence. One meritorious society matron, Mrs Grace Kimmings, squared her conscience by forming yet another charity which she styled ‘The League of Brave Poor Things’. Although nauseatingly patronising, I suppose her heart was in the right place. The League opened a hospital for children in the Sussex countryside, which is still there, though now mercifully known as the Chailey Heritage.

To be crippled almost became an end in itself until some stability was introduced by Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII. Though not crippled, Queen Alexandra had had tubercular glands in the neck incised as a young person, so she had suffered from the disease. She was moved to respond by founding the annual Rose Day Appeal. Since its inception the Appeal has broadened its base but still raises money in Britain for children over 80 years on, and indeed, helps fund some of those homes I used to cycle past when I was a boy.

Antibiotics have since become the mainstay of treatment for TB, replacing the prescribed fresh air, which preferably blew off some northern estuary or pristine Swiss alp, and hope has superseded the sense of fatalism associated with the disease. To see a tubercular hip now or an open ward of rugged-up children bending into a howling westerly as they get their ration of ozone, is a rarity. Mercifully, those bleak, carbolic-smelling homes up there in Blackpool have been put to other, less melancholic uses.

Dickens would have been the first to have approved.

MEDICINE AND CHARLES DICKENS

There is no doubt about the greatness of Charles Dickens, both as a novelist and, as we have seen in the previous chapter, a mouthpiece for the public conscience. But besides social issues, he was fascinated by things medical and wrote of them with the characteristic warmth, felicity and humour of someone who has been close to the action.

Take, for instance, the two irreverent medical students Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen who appeared in Pickwick Papers, a novel which first appeared in serial form in 1836, and was published as a book in 1837. These lads shared digs in Lant Street, Southwark — an actual place just round the corner from Guys Hospital where they studied, near Pickwick and Copperfield streets, and not far from the ‘Clink’, a gaol whose name has passed into the language.

As a 12 year old, when working at Warrens blackening warehouse, a job on which his partly autobiographical novel David Copperfield is based, Dickens himself lived in this same reeking lane. In Pickwick Papers he described it as an ally ‘which sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul’. I am sure it did.

The students, Sawyer and Allen, were chronically hard up and, along with their crony Jack Hopkins from St Bartholomew’s Medical School, were described by their landlady as ‘a parcel of young cutters and carvers of live people’s bodies … leaving her exposed to all manners of abuse’.

It is Hopkins who describes the unusual incident of the child who was brought into the hospital after swallowing 25 wooden beads. Later, while playing, his father heard what he took to be a small hailstorm. ‘Don’t do that, my boy, said the father. I ain’t doing nothing, said the child. Well don’t do it again, said the father!’

The child was shaken and much rattling was heard. ‘Why, it’s in the child! said the father, He’s got croup in the wrong place!’ The child was taken to St Bartholomew’s where he was muffled in a watchman’s coat for fear of waking the patients. The story is written with true Dickensian wit.

After qualification, Bob Sawyer went into general practice in Bristol. His indolence continued for, as he pointed out to Mr Winkle, of the drawers in his surgery half had nothing in them and the other half would not open. The only medical aid on the premises were some leeches, ‘and they are second hand’.

Dr Sawyer employed a boy to deliver medicines. Not to homes where illness lay within their portals, you understand, but to the doors of randomly chosen and quite unsuspecting households. As the young Sawbones has it, on being taken in, the incomprehensible labels were read by the bemused family, ‘pills as before — lotion as usual. From Sawyer’s; late Nockemorf’.

Next day the boy returned, apologised for the mistake as he retrieved the bottle and put it down to pressure of work. He thus ensured the name not only became known, but that the practice was thought to be very busy and well regarded and therefore worth a visit. A simple ploy in which, as Bob explains, ‘We have one four ounce bottle that’s been to half the houses in Bristol’.

If Sawyer and Allen became the two most famous medical students of Victorian times, out of the book Martin Chuzzlewit (published in 1844) comes the marvellous Sarah Gamp, certainly the most famous midwife of the era. Indeed, due to her habit of always carrying a bulky umbrella, ‘in colour like a faded leaf’, her name has passed into the language: ‘a gamp — an umbrella, especially a large, untidy one.’ She is also remembered for her immortal line regarding a patient: ‘He’d make a lovely corpse.’

Mrs Gamp lodged in a bird-fancier’s house, opposite a cat-meat warehouse. Her rooms were on the first floor, rented for being ‘easily assailable at night by pebbles, walking sticks and fragments of tobacco-pipe’. She was a fat woman whose rheumy eyes could roll into the back of her head so only the white showed. Her untidy gown was peppered with snuff and, ‘it was difficult to enjoy her company without becoming conscious of a smell of spirits’, as the author has it.

Despite her advertised profession, she would go to a lying-in or a laying-out with ‘equal zest and relish’. The only time she had felt faint was when she saw her late husband on the slab at Guy’s Hospital, ‘with a penny piece on each eye and his wooden leg under his left arm’.

Sarah Gamp had a drinking problem which she endeavoured to excuse by claiming to follow the advice of her fictitious friend, Mrs Harris. To new patients a bogus conversation between the two would be recounted, in which her friend had made a recommendation that the resolve of the nurse would be strengthened if a bottle be left on the chimney piece ‘just so I can put it to my lips, nothing more’.

Although Dickens portrayed her wonderfully as the archetypal mid-Victorian, pre-Florence Nightingale midwife, a local handy-woman in a filthy dress which concealed a bottle of gin and who had a penchant for ordering baths full of boiling water to occupy the time of anxious relatives, she herself saw an easier living was to be made in laying out the dead. For this chore she charged ‘eighteen pence for working people, and three and six for gentlefolk’, but protested that she would do it for nothing as long as the bottle was left, ‘and let me put my lips to it when I am so disposed’.

In the novel Martin Chuzzlewit Mr Pecksniff brings Mrs Gamp to Mr Mould the undertaker for a laying-out. The situation allows Dickens to give an incomparable description of a funeral director: ‘a man with a face in which a queer attempt at melancholy was at odds with a smirk of satisfaction; so that he looked as a man might, who, in the very act of smacking his lips over choice old wine, tried to make believe it was physic’.

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 and died on 9 June 1870. As regards his personal health, from his twenties onwards he suffered from tic douloureux, a spasmodic and very painful condition of a nerve in the face. In 1840, at the age of 28, he was operated on for bleeding piles and an anal fissure. As this was before the days of anaesthesia, the discomfort must have been intolerable. During his last years he suffered from bouts of depression, but usually managed to put on a brave face.

In 1869 he began to suffer from transient ischaemic attacks, a temporary loss of consciousness following a spasm of cerebral blood vessels. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage at his home in Gads Hill, near Rochester, site of many of Mr Pickwick’s escapades. He was