Orwell's Cough

Literary muses meet medical complaints in this marvellous look at the Bard, the Brontës, Milton, Swift, Joyce, and more

Stiff meets the Bard in this fun life-in-death take on the great literary ‘hacks’ from Milton to Swift to the Brontës to of course, George Orwell. The author’s original piece (and the inspiration for the book) on Shakespeare, sex, and syphilis was covered in outlets from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to the Times of India.

“The doctor suddenly appeared beside Will, startling him. Though he smiled reassuringly, the poet noticed that he kept a safe distance. In a soothing, urbane voice, he explained the treatment: stewed prunes to evacuate the bowels; succulent meats to ease digestion; cinnabar and the sweating tub… Desperate diseases called for desperate remedies.”

Did Will Shakespeare’s doctors addle his brain with cinnabar and mercury? Was Jane Eyre inspired by the plagued school that claimed the Brontë clan? Did writing 1984 kill George Orwell? Dr John Ross of Harvard Medical School opens his surgery to consult with the likes of Milton, Swift, Melville, Joyce, and Jack London, exploring the history of medicine as never before, from the Bard’s cloaked visits to Southwark to cure his unsavoury rashes to the arsenic-and-horse-serum jabs given for Yeats’s fevers. With novelistic flair and deep expertise, Ross reveals a wholly absorbing new view on the writer’s life.