How the 1% Paid for Their Transgressions with Disease

By Dov Michaeli MD, PhD of The Doctor Weighs In

Who doesn’t follow stories about the travails of the rich, famous and powerful? Think Bill Cosby, Brian Williams, Martin Shrekli, and Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky to name but a few. It seems all of them succumbed to the vice of hubris; they thought they were above the laws of mere mortals. And then, they were brought down with a vengeance. Of course, this is nothing new; a whole theatrical industry flourished in ancient Greece revolving around the tragedy wrought by hubris. But at least today’s demigod celebrities look to me hale and fit; none with those plebeian maladies of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. It hasn’t been always thus. There used to be a time when the rich and powerful paid for their transgressions not with jail time, but with disease.

The agony of gout

Gout used to be called “the disease of kings” or “blue-blooded disease”. Some very famous people suffered from this affliction, such as Alexander the Great, Christopher Columbus, Isaac Newton, and Henry VIII. Even Shakespeare’s Falstaff, the hard living, hard-drinking buffoon, exclaimed “a pox on my gout, a gout on my pox” (Henry IV, Part 2). Going even further back, an Egyptian medical hieroglyph from 2500 years ago describes the symptoms of…