The Patrician Malady. By Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau. Yale University Press. One in a hundred white males are at risk. Women seldom get it before menopause.
Executives are more likely to get it than blue-collar workers.
But it is modern and democratic, or at least meritocratic or upwardly mobile, a disease open to the talents. Unlike consumption, gout doesn't evoke the frail pallor of the ailing artist, a Keats or a D. H. Lawrence. Often unromantically sited in the big toe, gout is gross, not refined. Sensitive or refined persons suffered from ''nervous'' disorders instead. It was often identified with rheumatoid arthritis.