Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0018099 (gout)
 5,192 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The handwritten note of the post-mortem examination of Dr Samuel Johnson resides in the library of the Royal College of Physicians of London. Headed 'asthma' it suggests that he had only one functioning kidney, probably had hypertension, left ventricular hypertrophy and congestive heart failure. This article describes an imaginary presentation by Dr James Wilson, who did the autopsy, and alludes to Johnson's life, and medical history, including impaired vision and hearing, scrofula, abnormal limb movement, gout, abdominal cramps, melancholia and episodes of 'asthma' which were, more than likely to have been episodes of left ventricular failure. Johnson's personality as a demanding patient who took things into his own hands are described based upon reports from his physicians.
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PMID:Samuel Johnson's illnesses. 1687 22

This essay examines the medical debates over hereditary disease and moral hygiene in France between 1748 and 1790. During this time, which was marked by two formal academic exchanges about pathological inheritance, doctors critically studied the existence of hereditary diseases--including syphilis, arthritis, phthisis, scrofula, rickets, gout, stones, epilepsy, and insanity--and the problems that heredity might pose for curing and preventing these diseases. Amid public debate, doctors first treated heredity with formal skepticism and then embraced the idea. Their changing attitudes stemmed less from epistemological or cognitive reasons than from new cultural beliefs about gender, domesticity, and demographic policy. Fearing moral degeneracy and demographic decline, they argued that a number of social pathologies were truly hereditary and that these diseases spread within the family itself. These beliefs were seemingly confirmed by new clinical studies on tuberculosis. Though doctors conceded that hereditary diseases might limit Enlightenment hopes to perfect society, they also suggested that sexual hygiene and physical education could cure hereditary degeneracy and transcend genealogy and descent. Consequently, they stressed that physical regeneration was a dynamic process, one that stretched from the conjugal bed to weaning and beyond. Rather than accepting the accidents of birth, physicians believed that their patients could self-consciously overcome inherited defects and thus regenerate themselves and even all of society itself. Heredity thus gave doctors an idiom with which to diagnose a felt social crisis and to prescribe appropriate hygienic responses.
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PMID:Inheriting vice, acquiring virtue: hereditary disease and moral hygiene in eighteenth-century France. 1724 50

Dr Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) readily acknowledged that diseases including gout, consumption, scrofula, epilepsy, and insanity were hereditarily transferred. He also viewed a particular interconnectedness between intemperance (alcoholism) and other hereditary diseases. Darwin's view of 'hereditary' incorporated a malleable admixture of nature and nurture causes. Consistent with his deistic beliefs that development on the Earth followed no fixed plan, Darwin argued that hereditary diseases were not predestined. To overcome or prevent disease, Darwin argued that one must learn how best to exert power over nature and to improve nurture.
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PMID:Drink, dames & disease: Erasmus Darwin on inheritance. 1854 74