In Praise of Gout

Abstract

Gout is said to be a very painful disease. Yet it has had its ardent eulogists, not just beginning with Lucian, whose panegyrics are full of bitter irony, but with the German humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, who gives a reasonable account of all advantages gout could bestow on men. Hieronymus Cardanus tried to improve on him, but with small success. So Jacobus Balde SJ surpasses all writers before him with his immortal Solatium Podagricorum, where in an incomparable way he combines joke and seriousnes, Christian and Stoic morals.