Melville and Hawthorne were friends, and Oliver Wendell Holmes treated both in his role as a physician. Who knew there were (reasonably) effective treatments for venereal disease during the Renaissance? The discussions of Swift’s dementia and Milton’s blindness offer windows into the social milieus in which the writers moved, as well as their rather difficult personalities. That is especially true for the medical material. Other than specialists in literary history, most readers will find out more about these writers than they have ever known. Ross knows this, of course, and he makes a good effort to bring in other evidence. Shakespeare may well have suffered from syphilis, but references to it in his works aren’t necessarily proof that he did. He approaches his subjects chronologically, giving the book an added element of medical history, which is sometimes as interesting as the attempts to diagnose the subjects from the occasionally sketchy evidence. Ross, an infectious disease specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard, is well qualified to take on this topic. A doctor looks at symptoms afflicting writers from the Elizabethan era to the mid-20th century.
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