The Medical Kipling—Syphilis, Tabes Dorsalis, and Romberg's Test

Rudyard Kipling was the first English author to win the Nobel Prize for literature. He received this honor when he was not yet 42 years old. Indeed, Kipling's career is remarkable for its precocious success. His collection of verse Departmental Ditties was published when he was 20 years old. When he first went to England in 1889, he was already a well-known writer. In his short story Love-o'-Women, published in 1893 in the collection Many Inventions, Kipling gives a clinically accurate description of tabes dorsalis and what is probably the only literary description of Romberg's test. Love-o'-Women was published when Kipling was 27, a year after he had married Caroline Balestier, an American woman, and moved to Dummerston, Vermont. Kipling remained in Vermont for 4 years, during which time he wrote The Kipling and the Doctors Kipling's life and works are full of references to medicine , but they have received little attention in medical history , as pointed out by W.K. Beatty in a definitive article (1) published in 1975. Beatty gives credit to E.F. Scarlett for drawing attention to Kipling's " medical writings " in his article The Medical Jackdaw—Kipling and the Doctors (2). Kipling's interest in medicine is evident from one of his earliest verses, " The Song of the Sufferer, " which he wrote after a bout of fever and sore throat at age 13. The verse concludes, " For the doctor has harrowed his being,/ And of medicine wondrous the might is;/ He suffers in agony, seeing/ He is prey to acute tonsilitis. " As a schoolboy, Kipling acquired a copy of Culpeper's Herbals—a book by the 17th-century English physician Nicholas Culpeper. Many years later, in 1909, Kipling would write the story A Doctor of Medicine, based on Culpeper's life story. In 1910, he sent his friend Sir William Osler (Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford) a copy of Rewards and Fairies with a letter thanking Osler for inspiring the story. Another story, Marklake Witches, which features Rene Laennec, the inventor of the stethoscope , also drew on the life of William Osler. Kipling had many other physician friends. He acknowledged the help of his personal physician, James Conland, whom he called " the best friend I made in New England, " for helping him create an authentic American setting for his adventure story Captains Courageous. Kipling's most famous poem, " If, " was a …