Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough: The Medical Lives of Famous Writers (Hardcover)

from Sullywriter

A fascinating, engrossing take on literary biography. Ross is as wonderfully adept at writing about literature and history as he is about medicine.

from lauriebrown54

The writer of this book, John J. Ross, is a doctor who put his medical knowledge to work to try and figure out what ailments plagued ten classic authors- and what killed them. Everyone talks about their health, and authors are no different. Letters by and about them give lots of clues as to their...

from jenspirko

Brilliant and fascinating! An exhaustively researched and compelling look at the bodies (literally) behind some of the greatest works of literature.

from JBD1

A largely-speculative collection of essays in which Ross attempts to diagnose writers from Shakespeare to Orwell, Melville to Swift. Some of the evidence and documentation of the maladies Ross discusses is fairly conclusive, making for the most interesting portions of the book, but at points Ross...

from amanda4242

An interesting look at probable medical diagnoses for some of the world's greatest writers. Ross's book is frequently speculative, but he gives thorough support for his ideas and doesn't try to pass them off as fact.