Gout: The Patrician Malady

New England Journal of Medicine

I greatly enjoyed the book. No other disease could provide such reflections on the culture of the time. Porter and Rousseau analyze the interaction between gout and British culture brilliantly.

Journal of the American Medical Association

An interesting thorough review of the cultural history of "gout."

Claude Rawson

This abundant, generous, somewhat repititious and disorganized book is very good reading.
—New York Times Book Review

Library Journal

Porter is a well-known medical historian at the Wellcome Institute in London and author of The Greatest Benefit to Mankind LJ 2/15/98, perhaps the best general history of medicine available today. Rousseau is an English professor at the University of Aberdeen. Together, they have written a thorough and enlightening history of gout, whose most famous sufferers included Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon. They explore the medical establishment's changing views of gout and the public's reaction to the disease. They also examine the idea that gout was a disease of the wealthy and the graphic images of gout in the media. Particular attention is paid to the disease's literary aspects and how it has been portrayed in the novels of such authors as Dickens and Thackeray. While this book is highly recommended for medical history and large academic libraries, its scope may be too narrow for most public and college libraries, which should consider Porter's The Greatest Benefit to Mankind instead.--Eric D. Albright, Duke Medical Center Lib., Durham, NC

Claude Rawson

This abundant, generous, somewhat repititious and disorganized book is very good reading. -- The New York Times Book Review