Destined for fame—But one would not think it

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COMMENTARIES

133

REFERENCES

1. Williams, C. D.: Health services in the home. Pediatrics,

52:773, 1973.

2. Nathan, D. C.: Primary medical care and medical re-search training. Pediatrics, 52:768, 1973.

3. Rogers, D. E.: The American Health Care Scene.

Eighty-third Shattuck Lecture presented at the annual

meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society,

Boston, Massachusetts, May 30, 1973. New Eng. J.

Med., 288:1377, 1973.

4. Directory of Medical Specialists. Chicago:

Marquis-Who’s Who, Inc., 1971, vol. 14, p. 278.

5. Veeder, B. S.: Pediatric Profiles. St. Louis: The C. V.

Mosby Co., 1957.

Destined

for fame-But

one

would

not think

it

Retrospective studies are often unsatisfactory because of the absence of important data. This is certainly true of biographies. For a pediatrician

the

study of the early life of persons destined for world fame is fascinating-though often disap-pointing because so often facts which one would particularly like to know about a person’s child-hood are unknown and unrecorded. Often, one feels biographical details are more anecdotal than factual; yet there is much to be learned from a

study of the more useful biographies-and what one learns is not just a matter of interest. It is of much value in counselling distraught parents and teachers who are dismayed by the behavior, ap-pearance, backwardness or poor progress of their charges. An extensive search of numerous li-braries, such as that of the British Museum, re-vealed intriguing details about the childhood of famous and infamous men and women, and we put many of these together into a book1 and have learned of a few other interesting biographies since. But innumerable biographies studied by us contained nothing of interest.

Some children destined for fame, like Thomas Hardy, Pablo Picasso and Fran#{231}ois Voltaire were born dead-or at least very nearly so. Picasso was thought to be stillborn and was abandoned on the

table

by the midwife, but his uncle came at the critical moment and resuscitated him. Fran#{231}ois Voltaire at birth was given four days to live, but survived 84 years. Numerous others had a slender hold on life for almost the whole of childhood.

Many future geniuses were in childhood the

de-spair of their parents. William Wordsworth alone

of the four sons caused anxiety about his progress;

he was described as “stubborn, wayward, intracta-ble, with an unmanageable temper.” Charles Dar-win was told by his father, “you care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching; you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Lord Byron was said to be interested in nothing but “cricketting, rebelling, rowing and mischief.” Louis Pasteur worried his father, who thought that Louis was barely average in intelligence; in the Baccalaureat Louis was 15th in chemistry out of 22. The father of Beatrice Webb said that Beatrice “is the only one of my children who is below the general level of intelligence.” Little

did

he know what fame she would achieve in the socialist world. Handel’s father wanted George to be a bar-ber; Schubert’s father wanted Franz to be a schoolmaster; Dvorak’s father wanted Antonius to be a butcher.

Scores of children who were destined to achieve world fame were the despair of their teachers. Eu-gene Gauguin was a dreamer who was “complete-ly indifferent to lessons.” Ed#{244}uard Manet was

plorably inattentive” and caused his father, a judge, considerable anxiety. Auguste Rodin was described as “the worst pupil in school.” His fa-ther said, “I have an idiot for a son,” and his uncle said, “he is ineducable.” Gioacchino Rossini was a “lazy little boy who preferred to do nothing rather than any definite pursuit.” Sibelius was inatten-tive and

did

badly at school. Dr. John Hunter was described as being “impenetrable to anything in the way of book-learning.” “He was an idle surly dullard, irredeemable by punishment or reward.” James Watt was “dull and inept.” Thomas Edison was consist#{231}ntly at the bottom of his class, and his teacher said that his mind was

“addled.”

Thomas was extremely upset and refused to go to school again. George Borrow was

“dull

witted and slow of comprehension.” Claude Bernard

did

badly be-cause he thought that all reading was a waste of time. Albert Einstein was said to be unsociable and mentally slow. Leo Tolstoy was described as

being both unwilling and unable to learn. Oliver Goldsmith was “a stupid heavy blockhead, little better than a fool, whom everybody made fun of.” Jean de la Fontaine was “a hopeless dunce.” Sir James Mackenzie and Sir William Ross were “dunces” at school. Percy Sheridan “by common consent of both parents

and

preceptors

was a

most impenetrable dunce”; so

was

Clive of India. Hans Christian Andersen, Eugene Gauguin and Honor#{233}

de

Balzac did badly because they were given to constant daydreaming. Carl Jung

was

just

“stu-pid.”

Many children destined for fame were in trouble at school because of difficulty in certain subjects. Mathematics was

the

source of much

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134

DESTINED

FOR FAME

trouble and tribulation. Lord Northcliffe was “de-feated by the simplest exercises.” Mahatma Gan-dhi

“had

more difficulty in mastering his multipli-cation tables than in learning naughty words for his teachers.” Alfred Adler was so bad in mathe-matics that his teacher recommended that he should be apprenticed to a cobbler. Carl Jung wrote that “mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture” to him. Paul Nash wrote that “my masters were in despair. I think I must have been given marks for sheer perverse ingenuity. I have seen mathematical masters reduced to a sort of awe by my imbecility.” Benjamin Franklin and Pablo Picasso had trouble with mathematics. Charles Darwin was bad at languages. The Duke of Wellington had to leave school because of his failure in classics and went to a military academy. Paul Ehrlich was dreadful at German composition and nearly failed to secure University entrance as a result. Richard Wagner played truant from school for six months because of his trouble with Latin declensions. Winston Churchill could not go to Oxford or Cambridge because of his difficulty with Latin. Dr. John Hunter, Jan Smuts and Fri-edrich Froebel all had dyslexia: none could read until late adolescence. Many others, including Na-poleon Bonaparte, George Bernard Shaw, Wil-ham Yeats and Harvey Gushing had trouble with spelling throughout their life. Alessandro Volta, of “voltage” fame, and Albert Einstein caused much

anxiety

because of late speech.

Famous stutterers included Moses, Virgil, Charles Darwin, Arnold Bennett and Somerset Maugham. Emile Zola and Michael Faraday were ridiculed because of their defective speech.

Many children who were to achieve fame were unable to pass their examinations at school or col-lege. Auguste Rodin three times failed to secure entrance to the school of fine art. Emile Zola se-cured an 0 for literature at the Lyc#{233}e,failing in German and Rhetoric. Napoleon left school 42nd in place,. and the Duke of Wellington left 53rd out of 79. Nasser failed his examinations for the Law

School and went into the

Army.

Galileo was

re-fused his doctor’s diploma at Pisa. Gregor Mendel

twice failed his examinations for a teacher’s certif-icate. Albert Einstein was at 16 refused entrance to the Polytechnic at Zurich. Lord Baden Powell and Anthony Trollope both failed to secure en-trance to Oxford.

Numerous children destined for fame (or

in-famy) were expelled from school or college. They

included Charles Thackeray, George Gissing, Edgar Allen Poe and James Whistler (the latter two from West Point), Walter Sickert, Guy de Maupassant (for drinking the Father Superior’s wine), Salvador Dali (for refusing to allow his

teachers to criticize his art), Negley Farsson (for throwing his teacher into a duckpond), Sarah Bernhardt (three times, for imitating a Bishop, throwing stones at the Royal Dragoons and climb-ing over a wall at dark to talk to soldiers), Brendan Behan, Albert Einstein, William Randolph Hearst, Samuel Johnson (for playing truant

be-cause of a love affair), Field Marshall Gustav

Man-nerheim, hero of Finland (three times), Benito

Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Titus Oates (five times),

Sir William Osler (either for shouting insults through the keyhole at the headmaster, letting a flock of geese into the classroom, or removing all the desks from the classroom in the weekend and putting them into the loft), William Penn (from Oxford, for holding religious meetings), Percy Shelley (from Oxford, for atheism), Wilhelm R#{246}nt-gen (for drawing a caricature of his teacher), Ig-nace Paderewski and others. George Bernard

Shaw perhaps deserved to be expelled: he was

de-scribed by his teacher as “a disagreeable little

beast-and the devil incarnate.” George started a secret society sworn to give the wrong answers to

all questions put by his teacher. George said, “I

in-stinctively saved my brains from destruction by resolute idleness.” “I was given no reason why I should learn Latin instead of some living

lan-guage. There was, in fact, no reason as there were plenty of translations of all the classics.”

Many, even when they left school, showed no particular promise-yet fame was to come later. Eugene Gauguin was a ship’s stoker; Van Gogh a lay preacher and a schoolmaster at Ramsgate,

England; Gioacchino Rossini a blacksmith’s ap-prentice; Fred Delius an office boy; Thomas

Car-lyle a mathematics master; Edgar Wallace a

member of a crime gang, a Billingsgate porter and then a newspaper seller; Sir William Herschel a concert manager; Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford, George Stephenson, Dr. John Hunter and Ernest Bevin, farm laborers; Aneurin Bevan a butcher’s

boy; Ben Jonson a bricklayer; Sir Michael Faraday

an errand boy, an apprentice to a bookbinder and then a bottle washer in a laboratory.

Parents and teachers who despair of their young charges should beware. The rude uncouth bad-mannered teen-ager who slouches about, refuses to wash and seems to be against everyone but

him-self may soon become a delightful well-mannered

popular business or professional man. The adoles-cent with long hair, who smells, walks badly, dresses eccentrically, behaves abominably and

re-bels against authority may (perhaps) be the genius

of tomorrow.

RONALD S. ILLINGWORTH, M.D., F.R.C.P.,

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COMMENTARIES

135

D.P.H., D.C.H.

Professor of

Child

Health

The

University

of Sheffield

Sheffield, England

REFERENCES

1. Illingworth, R.S. S., and Illingworth, C. M.: Lessons From Childhood: Some Aspects of the Early Life of Unu-sual Men and Women. Edinburgh: E. & S. Livings-ton, Ltd., 1966

DR. JOHN LOVETT MORSE OF BOSTON ON A CHILD WITH DIABETES MELLITUS (1916)

Dr. John Lovett Morse (1865-1940), Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, published a popular texthook in 1913 entitled Case Histories

in Pediatrics. The method of case teaching which

had

been used in the Harvard Law School from about 1890 on, was introduced into the Harvard Medical School in 1900 at the suggestion of Dr. Walter B. Cannon, then a student in the school. Dr. Morse was an enthusiastic supporter of case history teaching because he believed that “this method of teaching is far superior to recitations, quizzes, and conferences.” The case history below of a child with diabetes mellitus, taken from the second edition of Morse’s book (1916), points out the grim prognosis of this disease in the pre-insulin days.

Charles W., eleven years old, was the child of healthy

par-ents. One brother was living and well. There had been no

deaths or miscarriages. His maternal grandfather had had

di-abetes, but had died of tuberculosis.

He was born at full term, was normal at birth and weighed six pounds. He had whooping-cough when one year old,

mumps and chicken-pox when small, and measles at four

years, but had otherwise been well. He had always eaten

much candy and had craved sweet foods. He had passed much more urine during the last month than formerly, and had drunk large quantities of water. He had to get up several

times at night to urinate and to allay his thirst. His appetite

was large. He had had no itching of the skin and no eruption.

He was admitted to Children’s Hospital, August 3.

Physical Examination. He was small and sparely

nour-ished. He was moderately pale, but did not look or act sick.

His skin was not dry or irritated, and there was no eruption. His tongue was slightly coated, the mouth and throat

nor-mal. The heart, lungs and abdomen were normal. The liver

and spleen were not palpable. The extremities were normal. There was no spasm or paralysis. The knee-jerks were equal

and lively. There was no disturbance of sensation. There was

no enlargement of the peripheral lymph nodes. He weighed

fifty-two pounds.

He was allowed to eat as much as he wanted of the regular

hospital diet, but was not allowed to put sugar on his food.

He passed 560 ccm. of urine (the normal average is 1,200 ccm.) August 4, of a specific gravity of 1,041, which con-tamed 5.9% or 33.6 grams of sugar. It contained no albumin

or acetone, and the sediment showed nothing abnormal.

An accurate account of what he ate was then kept. He took 85 grams of carbohydrates August 6 and passed 855

ccm. of urine of a specific gravity of 1,018, which contained 1.8% or 15.3 grams of sugar, but no acetone.

Diagnosis. There can be no doubt, of course, as to the

diag-nosis of DIABETES MELLITUS. A simple glycosuria can be

excluded on the persistence of the symptoms and the pres-ence of sugar in the urine when there is only a moderate

amount of carbohydrates in the food.

Prognosis. There is practically no chance that he will re-cover, although, judging from the fact that he was able to

make use of 70 grams of carbohydrates in twenty-four hours,

the disease is not of a very severe type. His expectation of life

is probably to be reckoned in months rather than in years,

but he may, with careful treatment, live for a number of years. He is, however, very likely to suddenly develop acid

intoxication at any time and die after a few days.

Treatment. Drugs are of no use in the treatment of di-abetes. The treatment consists in regulation of the diet. The principles are simple. The diet must contain calories enough

to supply the caloric needs. The carbohydrates must be cut

down until the urine is free from sugar, but no lower than is necessary to accomplish this, because of the danger of the development of acid intoxication. If the acetone bodies ap-pear in the urine when the carbohydrates are cut down, they must be increased again until the acetone bodies disappear.

If the amount of the acetone bodies is small, it is safe for a time, however, not to increase the carbohydrates, but to neu-tralize the acetone bodies by giving bicarbonate of soda. The

water should not be limited.

REFERENCE

Noted BY T. E. C., Jr., M.D.

1. Morse, J. L.: Case Histories in Pediatrics, ed. 2. Boston: W. M. Leonard, 1916, pp. 5 & 611-613.

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1974;54;133

Pediatrics

Ronald S. Illingworth

But one would not think it

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