In Sickness and in Power: Illness in Heads of Government During the Last 100 Years
by David Owen
Methuen, £25
THE people who govern us are an odd lot. So are we, but not as odd. We, too, may endure cardiovascular failure, alcohol-related conditions and, like President John F Kennedy, Crohn’s disease. But we don’t have the illusion that we ought to be ruling other people. Accountants come a little saner. Dr David Owen has written a perfectly delectable book about some of the ailments afflicting our heads of government, even some of the sanest, like Dwight Eisenhower (high blood pressure, stomach cramps, heart condition) and the greatest, Charles de Gaulle (enlarged prostate, arteriosclerosis).
Sometimes our leaders behave straightforwardly by going obviously mad; witness Paul Deschanel, President of France in 1920, leaving a stationary train, wandering off and insisting that he was President of France (a possible case of Elpenor’s syndrome where the patient’s mind periodically shuts off).
More typical was Ted Heath, perfectly sane but sadly afflicted. He had been (or looked) decisive but responded to the miners’ strike of 1973/4 by going into a laborious dither, making and unmaking up his mind about an election which, called straight off, would have been won. Six years later he was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an underperforming thyroid, marked by a steady slowing down of the system, readily mistaken for irresolution.
This is biochemical, but the condition of its beneficiary, Margaret Thatcher, is psychiatric and altogether more speculative, though one sees its charm – hubris syndrome! The layman recognises medical Greek for getting above yourself, bigheadedness in overdrive, what in football they called Cloughie’s syndrome? Owen, fascinated by mental states, cites “We are a grandmother” and he’s right. I would add the largely overlooked response to a question on TV – “Surely this problem would be difficult to handle?” – when she said: “Of course it will be difficult but, then, I’m Maggie.”
Then there is paranoia, sadly compatible with administrative efficiency and looking normal. We are given Stalin and the doctors’ plot which became the Jewish plot and then the everybody plot. Yakov Etinger was a doctor and, if not plotting, had been quite rude about Stalin on a tapped telephone; he was also Jewish. Horrid Lavrenti Beria was neither a doctor nor Jewish, but he was a Mingrelian (the wrong sort of Georgian) and thus part of the Mingrelian plot.
What about the opposite of paranoia? “Stubbornly persistent in futile policies, seemingly blind to his disintegrating political base, recklessly unresponsive to the growing conspiracy around him.” Anyone we know? No, it was Khrushchev.
Stalin thought his doctors were killing him, which they should have been but weren’t. Kennedy put profound trust in his doctors and they were. Innocently, you understand but if, like Dr Janet Travell, you regularly pump double the safe limit of procain into a president to ease his back pain, intention hardly matters. Kennedy also suffered at the hands of a society charlatan, Max Jacobson, who employed an inland sea of amphetamine solution which eased the pain and slewed the presidential mind, as did a mix of testosterone and steroids.
Kennedy had everything wrong with him: Addison’s disease, about which he and the medical corps frantically dissimulated, spinal injuries and diarrhoea. But it was the doctors who mattered. Owen, in a brilliant 50 page chapter, is clear that three vital undertakings – the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Vienna talks with Khrushchev and the Cuban missile crisis – failed and then succeeded as Kennedy changed doctors and swopped drugs for exercises. Perhaps the rest of us should get paranoid.
Edward Pearce
