Gout sounds like a horrifically painful condition brought on by affluence that was considered fashionable and a sign of wealth. Though we know now what causes gout, a buildup in uric acid caused by a rich diet of meats and booze that mostly affects men. It was a malady met with a lot of confusion back in the glory days of gout.
Today we're talking about the disease of kings, that is, gout. But before we dip our toes into this, be sure to subscribe to the Weird History channel and let us know about what favorite disease you would like to hear more about. Now get your anti-inflammatories ready.
We're going gouting. Gout is an arthritic condition characterized by the Mayo Clinic as sudden, severe attacks of pain, swelling, redness, and tenderness in the joints, often the joint at the base of the big toe. It's not surprising then that people affected by gout lovingly describe the condition as agonizing.
In the late 17th century, physician Thomas Sydenham wrote that gout was so exquisitely painful as to not endure the weight of the clothes nor the shaking of the room from a person's walking briskly therein. Translated roughly to today's nomenclature, gout was painful as [BLEEP]. So painful, in fact, one couldn't wear clothes or be in a room with people quickly pacing around.
Take your impatient pacing elsewhere, Thomas. Thomas likened the feeling of gout to that of a dislocated bone, which is not a favorable condition for a bone to be in. In the 19th century, Reverend Sydney Smith described his gout flareups as equal to walking on eyeballs.
So, yeah, good luck on seeing that pleasant picture from your brain. Much like Robin Hood, gout was thought to specifically attack the rich. From the earliest description from Hippocrates himself, gout was linked with indulgent foods and heavy alcohol consumption, a diet only the wealthy could afford.
Due to this fact, gout started getting a reputation as the disease of kings and even became a bit of a humble brag, depicted as desirable since it was a clear if not painful and gross proof of wealth. Poor people were priced out of the fun time gout provided. In an 1900 comment from the London Times, a writer claimed, the common cold is well named, but the gout seems instantly to raise the patient's social status, meaning gout sufferers were the original influencers of their times.
Hashtag meatfoot, hashtag datgoutlife. Medical treatments for gout ran the gambit as far as making any logical sense at all. From acupuncture in ancient China down to consuming autumn crocuses and the Byzantine Empire, it seemed like a lot of throwing darts at the wall and seeing what stuck.
But the strangest remedy of them all came from a 1518 medical book with a terrifying recipe for better health. Eat a fluffy little kitten. Physician Lorenz Fries described this on-the-level gout treatment recipe as, roast a fat, old goose and stuff with chopped kittens, lard, incense, wax, and flower of rye.
No, but we aren't done yet. Once you eat this kitten-stuffed goose, take the drippings from this creepy turducken Thanksgiving table centerpiece and apply to those achy, gouty joints, as one would with BenGay. And just to state the obvious to everyone, this concoction did not cure gout.
The closest to a cure of all these were the Byzantine's since today colchicine is used to treat gout, which is made from the autumn crocus and not from adorable house pets. You know what they say about a man's foot size? Well, they took that extremely seriously from the 16th to the 18th century.
Many during this time thought of gout as an aphrodisiac because nobody ever understood what a woman wanted. In 1588, essayist Michel de Montaigne declared, when a man's leg were in a weakened state, the genital parts are fuller, better nourished, and more vigorous. Nasty and wrong.
Gout of the junk is not a thing so no need to add that to your Bumble profile. In 1693, a Dutch writer, with a very loose idea of how a human body works, said gout was great because it allowed men to rest their reproductive organs due to the whole in so much pain I can't walk and must lay down aspect of having gout. He said, for when a patient who is suffering from gout is forced to lie on his back, anyone who knows the channels of the sperm trace their source to the kidneys can easily and at his leisure comprehend that the loins and the kidneys are hot and inflamed.
If you should find yourself with hot and inflamed kidneys, please go to a hospital immediately, no matter how excited you might also feel. The oldest description of gout dates back to 400 BCE by Hippocrates himself. He believed gout was the result of phlegm settling into the joints and claimed this delicious and unsettling condition to be incurable.
Hippocrates stated, persons affected with the gout who are aged have tophi in their joints, who have led a hard life, and whose bowels are constipated are beyond the power of medicine to cure. Hippocrates went on to assign the disease cute little nicknames, terming gout the unwalkable disease and arthritis of the rich, since he also noticed the correlation of an indulgent diet of rich food and wine and contracting fat beef foot disease. For centuries, the most glaringly apparent and widely understood trait associated with gout was its penchant for feet.
The ancient Greeks referred to gout as podagra, or foot grabber, due to the afflictions favorite place to settle in and get cozy was the big toe of the poor or, in most cases decidedly not so poor, gout sufferers. In the 17th century, our old pal Thomas Sydenham noticed this, too, describing a gout flareup, waking up a patient with a pain which usually seizes the great toe, but sometimes the heel, the calf of the leg, or the ankle. Today, doctors chalk up gout's foot fetish tendencies due to the extremities not being as warm as other parts of the body.
The big toe, in particular, collects a build up of urate crystals, gout's power source and favorite food because it is used the most frequently. The Boston Tea Party, a major step toward the American Revolution and the most tea ever spilled before Twitter, may not have even happened if not for gout. William Pitt the Elder, Britain's leading statesman was suffering a gout flareup during the parliamentary debate of the Stamp Act in 1764.
Once he was better, Pitt pushed to repeal the act, saying Americans are the sons, not the bastards of England. As subjects they are entitled to the right of common representation and cannot be bound to pay taxes without their consent. Yet another tinge of gout caused Pitt to miss yet another parliament meeting in which members agreed to impose a high tax on tea imported to the American colonies, which led to people dumping tea into a river over a boat to tell those English where they can stick their higher taxed tea.
If only Pitt had been there to argue his case, the Boston Tea Party may not have ever been a thing. Henry VIII, who we just did a video on recently, was a hot-tempered murderous King who got rid of a couple of wives and obsessed over his lack of male heir. But did you know he also had gout?
Yes, but hardly the only ruler to suffer from a bad case of the disease of kings. Decades earlier, the Florence Medici ruler Piero di Cosimo was so sick with gout he was rudely nicknamed Piero the Gouty by a less sensitive society than we have today. Benjamin Franklin, too, suffered from the affliction.
Benji the big gout baby wrote a letter to his beloved disease, saying Madame Gout, what have I done to merit these cruel sufferings? Gout did write back to him. Many things.
You have ate and drank too freely and too much indulged those legs of yours in their indolence. Pretty cool to write fan fiction of your crippling and chronic disease, but that's crazy old Ben Franklin. Another leader who fell victim to his diet of meats and wine was Emperor Charles V, whose empire included territories of Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.
Charles was a gout boy, but not like a regular gout boy, like the one that changed the course of history gout boy. Due to his meaty diet and love of beer and wine, including a novelty-sized four-handed drinking mug I'm sure everyone thought hilarious, his gout flareups were so severe that during his clashes with the French he could barely lead. After the French took Metz in 1552, our meaty emperor was suffering from the effects of gout so brutally he called off the attempt to recapture it from the French, handing them an important victory and bumming out the Emperor's army.
Charles basically said, don't blame me, blame my gout, before abdicating his throne and retiring to a monastery where nobody expected anything from him and he could suffer from his affliction without having to do things. Those who came down with a case of gout were advised to stay off their feet and rest. But in the interim, doctors came up with a few alternative, and let's face it, cute footwear to treat the symptoms.
For centuries, doctors would use a gout stool to relieve inflammation, which was quite literally just a common stool for which to rest a leg and not a magical stool that cured gout. Doctors would also wrap the foot in a flannel and told patients to wait for the bout of gout to pass, which could take up to two weeks. Advice also given to parents in the '90s, when their children, too, became wrapped in flannel.
Just wait for it to pass. By the early 20th century, physicians ditched the flannel and designed a glass boot, which doctors would use to apply heat to treat the symptoms of gout. While the heat might have provided temporary relief, it unfortunately also made things a whole lot worse.
Heat could dislodge the uric acid from its cozy home in the joints and travel straight to the kidneys, which were far less hospitable environment for uric acid, as the organ would shut down and the patient could perish. Gout is caused by hyperuricemia, or excess of uric acid in the blood. Estrogen provides protection for women from hyperuricemia, making them less likely to contract gout.
However, as women age and experience menopause, estrogen decreases while their are opportunities for gout, unlike their opportunities for meaty film roles, increases. Doctors have also discovered gout likes to keep it in the family, finding up to 80% of gout sufferers come from a family of fellow gout sufferers. Nepotism does work against people sometimes.
First recognized as a form of arthritis in 1848 by Alfred Baring Garrod, the condition continues to affect millions of people to this day. In fact, doctors are seeing cases of gout rise, with the affliction affecting 8. 3 million people in the United States alone.
As the US population becomes older and heavier, what with food and wine being so tasty and exercise being so, eh, I'll start it next year, doctors should probably expect those numbers to continue to climb. As should gout's social status, because Jared Leto and Dick Cheney are two notable people who both have the affliction. So have you had to deal with gout?
Do you feel shame? Let us know in the comments below. And while you're at it, check out some of these other videos from our Weird History.
