Description: When the flesh is weak, the spirit often reacts in an unusual way. Some memorable people have become difficult patients for their doctors, as well as demanding companions for their loved ones, and intolerable colleagues to their contemporaries. The course of history has frequently been altered by their ailments. Presented in the witty and erudite style that is Richard Gordon's hallmark are thirty-one cases of maladies and malingerers, among them: At Waterloo, Napoleon was incommoded with prolapsed piles, hardly the strategical equivalent of Nelson's blind eye at Copenhagen; A mortally ill King Charles II was offered a bracing Julep with forty drops of Spirit of Human Skull, which soon sped him on his way to a more heavenly kingdom; Hitler took laxatives and gave himself camomile enemas to lose weight (a mystical German leader could not be potbellied); and Dissatisfied with his medical advisers, Stalin ordered nine doctors thrown into chains, beaten to a pulp, and ground into powder - a most difficult patient indeed.

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