Vile Melancholy

Samuel Johnson was one of the most doctored men of his time; no fewer than 57 physicians and surgeons have been catalogued among his cronies, and most of them treated him. The more a Harvard medical student named Peter Pineo Chase read about Johnson's aches & pains, the more fascinated he became. Since 1907, he has made a hobby of studying Johnson from the vantage point of modern medical knowledge.

Dr. Chase, now a Providence surgeon, gives his diagnosis in the current issue of the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. The great writer's troubles began even before his birth. His mother had a long, difficult labor. "The child was almost dead and was unable to cry for some time," notes Chase. "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." This denial of oxygen to the newborn's brain, says Dr. Chase, probably affected Johnson's whole life.

The King's Evil. Dr. Chase believes that Johnson contracted scrofula (a form of tuberculosis then known as "the King's evil") from his wet nurse. It was treated, to no avail, by the royal touch of Queen Anne. Johnson's poor sight in his left eye, deafness in his left ear, and ugly blemishes on his face have all been blamed on scrofula. Chase believes that smallpox, which Johnson had as a boy, was as much to blame, or more.

It was "a tall, bony young man, deaf, half-blind, disfigured by scars, given to queer gesticulations and mutterings, and moody and often unsociable," who failed as a teacher and went to London. Chase thinks that these physical and social handicaps helped to make Johnson the scholar that he was, because there was nothing to distract him from his work.

In later life, Johnson was the victim of asthma, bronchitis, dropsy and gout. Yet in his last year, after a ten-week bout with asthma, Johnson was soon going to the club and making calls; six months before he died at 75, he visited Oxford, which meant a rough trip over rutted roads in a carriage without springs.

Back to Birth. Dr. Chase disagrees with most of what has been written about Johnson's "vile melancholy" and his eccentric mannerisms. He rejects both Neurologist W. Russell Brain's idea that Johnson's antics resulted from a sense of guilt (TIME, Jan. 9, 1950) and Professor (of English literature) Katharine Balderston's notion that they were caused by unrecognized erotic impulses. Chase suggests that birth trauma was largely to blame:

"Children who have suffered prolonged anoxia at birth or in infancy often develop tics, mannerisms, and personality changes. They are distinctly subject to sudden changes of mood, like Dr. Johnson, who would verbally annihilate some unfortunate and immediately after treat him with great tenderness . . ."

Chase thinks that Boswell's thoroughness as a biographer may actually have misled other latter-day diagnosticians. "Were we all so written up, erotic thoughts and all," he asks, "would we have a clean mental bill of health?"

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