Peter York looks back at 200 years of self-indulgence, from port to ketamine
Gout was the disease of the grand – or so they used to think. The result of glorious excess was a problem in the lower legs. The 1799 Gillray cartoon on the cover of Dorian Haskard’s new book, The Gout, shows a toff with his swollen legs up. It stood to reason that all that glorious food and all that alcohol had trickled down and festered up. Haskard describes how 20th-century medicine identified the real cause of gout – a build-up of uric acid, rather than port and roast beef – and developed a real cure. Still, the global incidence of gout continues to increase. The 18th-century English rich loved their booze and drank impossible-sounding amounts of it – port, brandy, claret and the rest. Starting at breakfast for the Prince Regent. It took nearly a century for serious drug-taking to become the smart-excess intoxicant. It soon became the staple...
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