Word: gout
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...still-smarting convalescent from the occupational disease of British Prime Ministers was Britain's Prime Minister last week. Hobbling gingerly after his first bout of gout (podagra) in 18 months, Neville Chamberlain presided over a Cabinet meeting, his left foot swathed in an enormous flannel boot. Outside, London was whistling the newest hit tune: God Bless You, Mr. Chamberlain. What consolation he could the Prime Minister took from echoes of this ditty and from the list of his distinguished gouty predecessors: Derby, Disraeli, Palmerston, Melbourne, Canning, the Pitts.-Several of these statesmen courted gout by stuffing themselves with mutton...
Chief cause of gout is imperfect elimination of uric acid, and attacks may be caused by heavy consumption of rich food, malt liquors, or by mental shock. Although 50% of gout is hereditary, overindulgence usually aggravates the underlying weakness. Rare in the whiskey-drinking U. S., gout is most common in aley Britain and beery Germany...
...kisses at the ceiling, and at the end of the first movement the audience cheered. Marcel Tabuteau grinned uneasily, but he did not rise to acknowledge the applause. When it was all over he boosted himself out of his chair and hobbled off the stage. Marcel Tabuteau had the gout. For two weeks, on tour, he had been traveling in wheel chairs, ambulances, on crutches, in the arms of his fellow orchestra musicians. For the Philadelphia Orchestra without Marcel Tabuteau would be like soup without salt...
Marcel Tabuteau did not so much mind the gout itself as the fact that it keeps him from his favorite occupation: eating. For Marcel Tabuteau is not only Philadelphia's first oboe player, he is also Philadelphia's most spectacular gourmand. "For two weeks I am on a milk diet!" he exploded. "Do you know what that is like? The hunger, it does not leave me. Whatever I do, wherever I go, it is like something I cannot take off. To me the cooking and eating are arts as great as music-maybe greater. One more week...
...nightfall in 1744 after a 15-month voyage from London, he found India a "battered caravanserai." Its warring kinglets misruled some 90 distinct peoples whose languages were Babel. Its climate was hotter than its curry. Its diseases were "consumptions, fluxes, fevers, cholera, scurvy, berbers (a kind of paralysis), smallpox, gout, the stone, prickly heat, tetters or worms...