In the biography of Joseph Conrad, written by John Stape, entitled “The Lives of Joseph Conrad (Lumen),” we are introduced to the author as a man suffering from a painful variant of arthritis called “gout”; a disease caused by the accumulation of uric acid crystals.
In one of the photos in Stape's book we see Conrad with an orthopedic bandage on his right hand. In his case the disease is called “Chiragra”; a form of gout that affects the joints of the hands and causes inflammation of the fingers. Conrad's seizures were sudden and prolonged, lasting into the final days of his life. Without going into details, the photo above was taken a few weeks before the heart attack that took his life on August 3, 1924, at the age of sixty-six. According to John Stape, Conrad's life was one of constant suffering, as the unfortunate uric acid crystals prevented him from writing consistently, forcing him to resort to dictation for some of his works.
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The name of this metabolic disease takes us back to the 13th century, when doctors at the time assumed that the cause was a leakage of bad blood fluids; a “drip” that reached the joints. It has been suggested that gout might be caused by excessive consumption of high-fat foods, but little else. Only at the end of the 18th century was an excess of urate found in the analyzed deposits (tophi). In this case, the tophi used for analysis was the ear of the British physicist and chemist William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828). After analysis, Wollaston himself stated that the material obtained was a mixture of lithic acid and an alkaline mineral. But it was the French chemist Antoine de Fourcroy (1755-1809) who gave it its first and last name: uric acid.
Gout used to be known as the disease of the rich or kings. The first gout sufferer of whom there is any evidence was Hieron (478-467 BC), tyrant of Syracuse. According to Plutarco, he was “affected by kidney grit.” However, Charles V was the model for gout. The writer Pedro Antonio de Alarcón said of him that he was “the most voracious emperor that there was and will be.” It is known that he accumulated fish, birds, meat, fruits and cured meats in the Yuste Palace. His pain was so severe that he had to be carried on a chair; He even had to postpone the capture of the city of Metz. It is strange that a military decision was influenced by a condition whose origins lay in gluttony.
On closer inspection, “gout” as a disease of the rich – or of kings – is still a myth on par with the other myth that Joseph Conrad was a writer of novels and stories of action and maritime adventure when it was the opposite was still right. Conrad was an introspective storyteller, a storyteller of dead times, whose stories he took with him to the sea, to Costaguana or to the current of the Congo, where he navigated through a gallery of mirrors until he reached the other shore; where the heart is shrouded in darkness.
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