Gout Quotes

• The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

  George Eliot

  Rich, Accepting, Respectable

  George Eliot (2014). “Silas Marner”, p.18, Lulu Press, Inc

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• People wish their enemies dead - but I do not; I say give them the gout, give them the stone!

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  People, Giving, Enemy

  Letter from Horace Walpole to the Earl of Harcourt, 17 September 1778, in W. S. Lewis et al. (eds.) 'Horace Walpole's Correspondence' vol. 35 (1973) p. 489

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• Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, & sloth; Or the Gout will seize you and plague you both.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Girl, Food, Wine

  Poor Richard's Almanack (1734)

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• The best medicine I know for rheumatism is to thank the Lord that it ain't gout.

  Josh Billings

  Medicine, Lord, Best Medical

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• Gout, a physician's name for the rheumatism of a rich patient

  Ambrose Bierce

  Names, Physicians, Patient

  The Devil's Dictionary

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• Gout, unlike any other disease, kills more rich men than poor, more wise men than simple. Great kings, emperors, generals, admirals and philosophers have all died of gout.

  Thomas Sydenham

  Wise, Kings, Simple

  Thomas Sydenham, Robert Gordon Latham (1850). “The works of Thomas Sydenham, M.D.”, p.129

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• I confidently affirm that the greater part of those who are supposed to have died of gout, have died of the medicine rather than the disease - a statement in which I am supported by observation.

  Thomas Sydenham

  Medicine, Disease, Medical

  Works 'A Treatise on Gout and Dropsy' (transl. R. G. Latham) (1683)

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• Gout produces calculus in the kidney... the patient has frequently to entertain the painful speculation as to whether gout or stone be the worst disease. Sometimes the stone, on passing, kills the patient, without waiting for the gout.

  Thomas Sydenham

  Waiting, Disease, Stones

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• Pain, scorned by yonder gout-ridden wretch, endured by yonder dyspeptic in the midst of his dainties, borne bravely by the girl in travail. Slight thou art, if I can bear thee, short thou art if I cannot bear thee!

  Seneca the Younger

  Girl, Art, Pain

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• When I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, with other innumerable distempers lying in ambuscade among the dishes. Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every animal but man keeps to one dish. Herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of a third. Man falls upon everything that comes in his way; not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or a mushroom can escape him.

  Joseph Addison

  Lying, Fall, Science

  Joseph Addison (1827). “A Selection [- Second Selection] from the Paper of Addison: In the Spectator and Guardian, for the Use of Young Persons”, p.236

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• Luxury and Ostentation usually make me feel antsy, like I'm going to get a case of gout.

  Stephan Jenkins

  Luxury, Cases, Feels

  "He can see clearly now / Third Eye Blind's Stephan Jenkins looks at success, love, creativity". Interview with Julian Guthrie, www.sfgate.com. April 20, 2003.

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• Nothing agrees with me. If I drink coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine, it gives me the gout; if I go to church, it gives me dysentery.

  Mark Twain

  Coffee, Wine, Giving

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• Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.

  Hippocrates

  Eunuchs

  Hippocrates (1900*). “Aphorisms”, p.46, Library of Alexandria

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• The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning—first fallen flake of the coming snows of age—is a disagreeable thing.... So are flying twinges of gout, shortness of breath on the hill-side, the fact that even the moderate use of your friend's wines at dinner upsets you. These things are disagreeable because they tell you that you are no longer young—that you have passed through youth, are now in middle age, and faring onward to the shadows in which, somewhere, a grave is hid.

  Alexander Smith

  Morning, Wine, Hair

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• The sound of the flute will cure epilepsyand sciatic gout.

  Theophrastus

  Sound, Flutes, Cures

  Quoted in David Pickering Brewer'sTwentieth-Century Music (1994).

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• He who is proud of his knowledge, has gout in the wrong end.

  Thomas Adams

  Proud, Ends

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• Gout is not relieved by a fine shoe nor a hangnail by a costly ring nor migraine by a tiara.

  Plutarch

  Shoes, Tiaras, Fine

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• I had an attack of the gout two days before pulling out, and I went limping off to the war instead of coming limping back from it.

  A. J. Liebling

  War, Two, Limping

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• Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet.

  Joseph Addison

  Nature, Simple, Delight

  Sir Richard Steele, Joseph Addison (1753). “The Spectator”, p.105

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• It is with jealousy as with the gout. When such distempers are in the blood, there is never any security against their breaking out, and that often on the slightest occasions, and when least suspected.

  Henry Fielding

  Jealousy, Blood, Occasions

  Tom Jones Bk II, Ch. 3

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• Old age doth in sharp pains abound; We are belabored by the gout, Our blindness is a dark profound, Our deafness each one laughs about. Then reason's light with falling ray Doth but a trembling flicker cast. Honor to age, ye children pay! Alas! my fifty years are past!

  Pierre-Jean de Beranger

  Children, Pain, Fall

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• A victim to certain obscure forms of gout, he was in character neither stupid, nor inhuman, but he suffered from the usual drawbacks of his class, - too much money, and too few ideas.

  Mary Augusta Ward

  Stupid, Character, Ideas

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• Again, now, now, again Plashes the rain in heavy gouts, The crinkled lightning Seems ever brightening... And loud and long Again the thunder shouts His battle-song, - One quivering flash, One wildering crash, Followed by silence dead and dull, As if the cloud, let go, Leapt bodily below To whelm the earth in one mad overthrow, And then a total lull.

  James Russell Lowell

  Letting Go, Song, Rain

  James Russell Lowell (1876). “The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell”, p.7

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• In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration; gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Rainbow, Brave, Doubt

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1975). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1848-1851”, p.168, Harvard University Press

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• So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

  Ned Beauman

  Frustration, Threatening, Illness

  "The Teleportation Accident". Book by Ned Beauman, July 19, 2012.

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