Post Mortem - Solving History's Great Medical Mysteries

We are fascinated by other people's problems; we are fascinated by celebrity-and when celebrities have problems, the effect is synergistic, rather than additive. This is not merely the province of tabloids and daytime television-serious scholars crave their fix of morbid gossip too. Historical diagnosis has a long and juicy history, and in " Post Mortem " , Mackowiak revisits some of the most controversial diagnostic conundra from ancient times to the more recent past. In many cases we have only documentary accounts or artistic representations, and the reports of the times may be coloured by hearsay, political spin or mistaken superstition. Be that as it may, we like to feel in touch with our forebears, and maybe there is no better way to do it than to pick over their symptoms, real or imagined. This volume arises from a selection of cases from a series of historical Clinicopathological Conferences (CPCs; analogous to the Grand Rounds or clinical meetings that we in the UK know and love) held by the author in Baltimore, where he is a distinguished professor of Medicine. The first case on Mackowiak's cold analytic slab is Egypt's heretic sun king Akhenaten, who ruled in the glorious heyday of the New Kingdom in the 14th century BCE. Abandoning the ways of his forefathers, Akhenaten launched a radical programme in which he overturned the cults of the traditional Egyptian gods, and promoted the monotheistic worship of his one true god, represented by the solar disc, the Aten. Even the traditional representational art of Egypt was redefined , and his depictions show him with elongated limbs, a pot belly, a serpentine neck, and other features previously unseen-and unthinkable-in the normally austere and idealised Egyptian artistic canon. There has been a lively debate over whether these were depictions of Akhenaten in his true likeness, or an affected artistic style encapsulating new Atenist ideas of other-worldly royal divinity. Taking the former approach, many scholars have proposed diagnoses that might account for this etiolated phenotype. By far the most plausible proposition in my opinion is the connective tissue disorder Marfan syndrome, although Mackowiak ditches this on relatively flimsy grounds in favour of Klinefelter syndrome. Akhenaten and his wife, the legendary beauty Nefertiti, had at least six children who were represented in a similar style to Akhenaten himself, which would seem to exclude Klinefelter at a stroke, as Klinefelter syndrome causes infertility (and it …