FRIDAY, Jan. 14, 2005 (HealthDayNews) -- Toward the end of his life, the Bard went bald, and he may have developed a tremor, too.
Considering those symptoms along with William Shakespeare's eternal fascination with venereal disease, one doctor thinks he knows why the world's greatest writer slowed down in his later years: He was suffering from mercury poisoning due to treatment for syphilis.
While Shakespeare wasn't "mad as a hatter" -- like the hatmakers of the time who inhaled too much mercury vapor on the job -- Dr. John J. Ross thinks the side effects of the treatment probably made it difficult for him to physically write.
And "if he had a venereal disease, some of the attitudes toward women become understandable," said Ross, an infectious diseases specialist at Tufts University who writes about his theory in the Feb. 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Venereal disease was hardly uncommon in the 16th and 17th centuries. Syphilis was especially dreaded because it could lead to a variety of nasty symptoms and death, and residents of several European countries blamed their neighbors -- syphilis was the "French malady" in England, and the French called it the "Neapolitan disease," after the supposedly lascivious residents of Naples.
Shakespeare, whose raunchiest plays are peppered with jokes about prostitutes and sexual intercourse, was no stranger to the existence of venereal disease. Ross found several lines in his work that seem to refer to syphilis: Shakespeare writes about "the pox," "the infinite malady," and "the incurable bone-ache," and a sonnet associates "canker" -- a kind of boil -- with "vice" and "lascivious sport."
In another sonnet, Shakespeare mentions that "love's fire heats water," which Ross interprets as a reference to a burning sensation during urination, a symptom of syphilis. Venereal disease "had an imaginative hold on him," Ross said.
But Helen Vendler, an expert in Shakespeare's sonnets and professor of English at Harvard University, said the playwright took the "love's fire" line from an Italian poem. "It has nothing to do with disease, it just has to do with being inflamed with love," she said, adding that Shakespeare is "not writing autobiographically in the plays or poems."
Some people think he was, and Ross is hardly the first person to make much ado about the possibility that Shakespeare was infected with syphilis. However, Ross said no one else has examined the possibility of mercury poisoning.
Along with hot baths, which may have reduced the symptoms of syphilis by creating fever, exposure to mercury was a major treatment for the disease in Shakespeare's time, Ross said. Physicians heated a mercury compound on a hot plate and the patient would breathe in the fumes.
According to Ross, the evidence that Shakespeare was treated in this way included several potential side effects, including baldness and an apparent tremor that made the handwriting in his will appear jiggly. Then there's the matter of the drop-off in Shakespeare's work toward the end of his life.
"Mercury is classically associated with psychiatric disease," Ross said, "and it can cause personality change, timidity and social withdrawal."
Ross doesn't blame Shakespeare's mysterious death in 1616 at the age of 52 on syphilis or mercury poisoning. But he does think a nasty case of venereal disease, perhaps from a prostitute, could have affected his work by making him less than charitable toward women.
To believe or not to believe? That is the question about Ross's Shakespeare theory, and one scholar has doubts.
For one thing, the topic of syphilis may have appealed to Shakespeare for reasons other than personal experience. It provided "an instantly effective way of connecting pleasure with pain -- always an attraction for writers," said Russell Jackson, a professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Birmingham in England.
He added that "if every Elizabethan writer who wrote vividly and with scabrous detail about the malady of France in all its variants actually suffered from it, they would have been the poxiest generation of playwrights and pamphleteers in our history."
But Ross countered that an epidemic of syphilis may have indeed haunted writers at the time, just like another disease -- AIDS -- decimated the artistic community in the 1980s.
More information
To learn more about the Bard, visit the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
