The Ailments and Physicians of Dr. Johnson *

Boswell and other writers have made Johnson probably the most intimately known man of all time. His medical history is almost as explicit. With the exception of the period from early manhood to middle age-in general, a time lacking in medical incidents-we can follow his case history from before birth through his autopsy two days after death. Johnson's mother was forty years old when she had her first labor; an "elderly primip," as we said at the Boston Lying-In. Mr. Hector, the man midwife, reported that she had a long, difficult labor, that the child was almost dead and was unable to cry for some time.' As Joseph Priestley, the Unitarian minister whom Johnson abhorred, had not as yet isolated oxygen, naturally it was not then appreciated that the child was presumably extremely anoxic. We know now that such a birth condition may show its effects on the brain long after. Later in the paper this will be discussed. Within a few weeks the baby had an abscess of the buttock, which might well have been due to a burn, as was then suspected. He was soon put to a wet nurse who had already suckled her child for eighteen months. Possibly this was harder on the nurse than on the child. This woman's son had scrofula, ominous of Samuel's exhibition of the same trouble later.2 Presumably, the bovine tuberculosis can be transmitted by human as well as cow's milk, and in a few years young Johnson had tuberculous glands of the neck treated by the royal touch of Queen Anne.' In the early years of my practice we saw many cases of this disease-in fact, at the hospital we had a special clinic devoted to its care. As I look back on our experiences I have no conviction that our therapeusis was better than that of the Stuart lady. Johnson's poor sight in his left eye, his deafness in his left ear, and the blemishes on the skin of his face have always been considered the aftermath of his scrofulous infection. I wonder if all of this was true. Tuberculous and syphilitic keratitis were rather common in those days. Since we have not the slightest reason to suspect lues in the respectable Johnson family, there is a perfectly good chance, but no certainty, that his eye trouble was tuberculous. We may have much more skepticism about his deafness having the same etiology. Tuberculosis of the middle ear is a chronic destructive disease, in many cases involving the mastoid bone and nearly always perforating the