Post Mortems Two: Mere Mortals: Medico-Historical Essays

What would history look like if read through a doctor's eyes? Charles MacLaurin, writing with the confident wryness of a physician who has seen too much to accept the neat narratives of historians, turns his attention to the great and terrible figures of European history and asks the question no one thought to ask: what were they sick with? The results are revelatory, unsettling, and often blackly funny. Here is Henry VIII not as the Tudor monster of legend but as a man whose changing temperament might be traced to a jousting injury and its complications. Here is Ivan the Terrible, whose rages and paranoia MacLaurin parses like symptoms. Here is Nietzsche, whose final years in Turin become a case study in the tragedies of the body. Spanning from Samuel Johnson to Frederick the Great, from the Children's Crusade to the epidemics that reshaped cities, these essays are less interested in battles and treaties than in the secret engines of flesh and mind that drove their subjects toward glory, madness, or damnation. MacLaurin writes with genuine learning worn lightly, with diagnostic precision deployed for maximum narrative effect. This is history with a stethoscope pressed to its chest.