Confined by the Gout — Perceptions of Men’s Physical Health

Abstract

One morning Robinson Crusoe’s father called him into his chamber to expostulate warmly on the subject of Crusoe’s ‘rambling thoughts’. The elder Crusoe had made a comfortable estate as a merchant and was now retired from trade. He had also developed gout, that familiar companion to men’s material good fortune. Gout is rarely commented on in the vast body of literature on Defoe’s novel, yet the elder Crusoe’s incapacitation undermined his remonstrance that the life he had chosen — one of temperance, industry and modest ambition — was the basis of happiness. His physical discomfort that morning had confined him to his bedroom and perhaps even added to the tetchiness of his tone to his son. For readers of Robinson Crusoe at the end of the eighteenth century, gout was a visible, pervasive and painful symbol of the consequences of a an industrializing and commercializing world which seemed to prove that ‘man was never intended to be idle’. This was the claim of physician William Buchan in his popular Domestic Medicine in 1769. ‘Inactivity frustrates the very design of his creation,’ he explained, ‘whereas an active life is the best guardian of virtue, and the greatest preservative of health’.¹

Every man his own physician — The natural result of wealth, luxury and indulgence — No man can completely act up to it — Relief from the restraint of civilized life — The new world regenerates the old?