In this cock to Aesculapius,” a distinguished pathologist shows how simple medical analyses can be applied centuries later to reconstruct the scene and assign a more probable cause of disability or death.
The tenessays selected for this volume range from an investigation of Boswell’s repeated infection with gonorrhea to a critical examination of Plato’s account of Socrates’ death in the Phaedo, subjects both ancient and modern. Other essays include studies of the ailments of two medical doctorsWilliam Carlos Williams and Chekhovand the disabilities of Swinburne, Lawrence, Rochester, Shadwell, Keats, Collins, Cooper, and Smart.
Documenting a wealth of physical and psychological symptoms that bear directly upon the writer’s workwhen there is a medical question,” Dr. Ober writes, consult a doctor”Dr. Ober diagnoses Swinburne’s masochism and penchant for writing flagellatory verse and facetiae as the combined results of anoxic brain damage at birth, sexual impotence, and the exposure to flagellation at public school. D. H. Lawrence’s dirty words,” he finds, stemmed from Lawrence’s psychological needs. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover while tuberculosis was weakening him physically, and the combination of his repressed homosexual tendencies and sexual impotence distorted his view of sexual relations. Rochester’s bisexuality and double life” were at the root of his experience, celebrated in his poetry, of premature ejaculation, Dr. Ober shows. Dr. Ober also shatters two legends by proving that Shadwell did not die of self-administered laudanum and that Socrates’ death was not reported accurately by Plato.
A pathologist by training and practice, more specifically a histopathologist, Dr. Ober has spent most of his life trying to diagnose diseases by looking through a microscope at pieces of tissue removed from the human body by biopsy, at surgery or autopsy. By applying medical analyses, and evidence from other disciplines as well, Dr. Ober scrutinizes selected literary subjects and brings to their mind-body problems new and often astonishing interpretations.

Boswell's Clap and Other Essays: Medical Analyses of Literary Men's Afflictions (Medical Humanites)

Literature & Fiction

Ober M.D., Dr. William B.

History & Criticism

Southern Illinois University Press

The reader will note,” Dr. Ober explains, that psychopathology occupies a prominent place in these essaysmelancholia, masochism, hysteria, autoerotic asphyxia, and other dinner table topics.” The book opens with a brisk discussion of flagellationstudded with rare illustrations. Like all of the essays in the book, this is an illuminating chapter, scholarly and good natured at the same time, and one that gives rise to speculation concerning human nature and human history.
Ober provides medical answers to many mysteries. In a discussion of infertility in the Bible, he speculates medically as to why Onan and his older brother Er died during coitus. In the eyes of the doctor, these biblical antiheros may deserve our pity, but not our scorn. He also explains the role of Reuben’s mandrakes in fertilizing the barren Rachel. Equally fascinating is his discussion of the mandrake, a wondrous weed and sire of legend and superstition.
Ober shows why an unfamiliar composer named František Koczwara got himself hanged in a London whorehouse. He tells of the aborted homosexual sadism in Robert Musil; the murder, madrigals, and masochism in the life of composer Carlo Gesualdo; the iconography of leprosy; the iconography of Fanny Hill (or how to illustrate a dirty book); the melancholia of Johnson and Boswell; the short, miserable life of Rimbaud; and other mysteries to which medicine may hold the key.

Bottoms Up!: A Pathologist's Essays on Medicine and the Humanities

Literary

Biographies & Memoirs

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