Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough by John J. Ross

Ross sniffs out a lot of Asperger cases - he suggests the high-functioning autism variant as a possible or partial diagnosis for Milton, Swift, Emily Brontë, and W.B. Into a satisfying series of medical mysteries he injects notes of wry humor and obvious affection, especially for Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose friendship fizzled as quickly as it ignited, no doubt due in part to the former’s bipolar grandiosity and the latter’s extreme social anxiety. This is not new territory, and Ross spends nearly as much time debunking previously-held diagnoses - rejecting the idea that James Joyce’s syphilis caused his daughter Lucia’s mental illness, for instance - as he does advancing his own theories. This lively, occasionally squirm-inducing book sketches the case histories of 10 writers whose health influenced their literary work - whether by cutting it short, as with George Orwell and Charlotte Brontë, both of whom died young of tuberculosis, or by influencing mental and emotional states, as Ross posits in the cases of Jonathan Swift and Herman Melville. Without having endured illness (along with political disgrace and imprisonment), Ross argues, Milton couldn’t have written with such sympathy and nuance.

Nothing worked Milton went blind, and it was as a blind man that he composed “Paradise Lost,” the epic poem about the Garden of Eden and Satan’s relationship to God. Ross, a doctor, points out, his options were limited as 17th century medicine was dominated by “substances of doubtful therapeutic value, including cat-ointment, human sweat, human placenta, human ordure, saliva of a fasting man, oil of spiders, oil of scorpions,” and so on. John Milton tried everything to retain his sight.

Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough by John J. Ross