Health of Samuel Johnson
Many conditions have been thought to afflict Johnson include scrofula, poor vision, fear of madness, stroke, gout, depression, and Tourette syndrome, and others.
His health and conditions had "damaging effects on Johnson's personal and professional lives"[1] likely causing him to lose opportunities to teach at prominent schools, while leading him "towards the invisible occupation of authorship".
[1] Upon birth, Johnson did not cry and, with doubts surrounding the newborn's health, his aunt claimed "that she would not have picked such a poor creature up in the street".
[3] Two godfathers were chosen: Samuel Swynfen, a physician and graduate of Pembroke College, and Richard Wakefield, a lawyer, coroner, and Lichfield town clerk.
[10] Swynfen wrote back "from the symptoms therein described, he could think nothing better of his disorder, than it had a tendency to insanity; and without great care might possibly terminate in the deprivation of his rational faculties.
[12] Boswell claimed that Johnson "felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible melancholia, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery".
[14] Thrale's experience is similar to many other accounts; James Anderson reported Adam Smith as telling him: I have seen that creature bolt up in the midst of a mixed company; and, without any previous notice, fall upon his knees behind a chair, repeat the Lord's Prayer and then resume his seat at table.
[20] She made it clear whom she was referring to when she wrote in Thraliana that "I don't believe the King has ever been much worse than poor Dr Johnson was, when he fancied that eating an Apple would make him drunk.
[22] On 17 June 1783, Johnson had a stroke resulting from poor circulation[23] and he wrote to his neighbour, Edmund Allen, that he had lost the ability to speak.
Before the writings of Lawrence C. McHenry in 1967, many of Johnson's actions and health related aspects were characterised as part of his ongoing depression.
As Walter Jackson Bate puts it, "one of the ironies of literary history is that its most compelling and authoritative symbol of common sense—of the strong, imaginative grasp of concrete reality—should have begun his adult life, at the age of twenty, in a state of such intense anxiety and bewildered despair that, at least from his own point of view, it seemed the onset of actual insanity".
Johnson displayed signs of TS as described by the writings of Boswell: ... while talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand.
Generally when he had concluded a period, in the course of a dispute, by which time he was a good deal exhausted by violence and vociferation, he used to blow out his breath like a whale.
[36] When asked by Christopher Smart's niece, a young child at the time, why he made such noises and acted in that way, Johnson responded: "From bad habit.
[38][39] In 1994, J. M. S. Pearce analysed—in a Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine report—the details provided by Boswell, Hester Thrale, and others, in an attempt to understand Johnson's physical and mental condition.
[39] Murray based his diagnosis on various accounts of Johnson displaying physical tics, "involuntary vocalisations" and "compulsive behaviour".
[45] According to neurologist Oliver Sacks, "the case for Samuel Johnson having the syndrome, though [...] circumstantial, is extremely strong and, to my mind, entirely convincing".
[46] He continues by generally describing the "enormous spontaneity, antics, and lightning quick wit" that featured prominently in Johnson's life.
It may be thought that without this illness Dr Johnson's remarkable literary achievements, the great dictionary, his philosophical deliberations and his conversations may never have happened; and Boswell, the author of the greatest of biographies would have been unknown.
