When Illness Goes Public: Celebrity Patients and How We Look at Medicine (review)

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Americans are inundated with—and fascinated by—stories of celebrities who are ill. From struggles with postpartum depression to battles with metastatic testicular cancer, sagas of famous people’s engagements with disease fill newspapers and tabloids, talk shows and movies, public health announcements, and specific disease foundation campaigns. Yet as recently as sixty years ago, confrontations with disease by otherwise public figures were regarded very much as private affairs; to wit, Woodrow Wilson’s devastating stroke in 1919 was kept secret for the remainder of his presidency, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declining health during the 1940s was shielded from public view. How, then, did this phenomenon of the publicly ill celebrity arise, and what does this history reveal about our culture?

In When Illness Goes Public, Barron H. Lerner addresses these questions though a series of inquiries, each focused on a particular famous patient: Lou Gehrig retreats in 1939 from the baseball diamond due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; another baseball player, Jimmy Piersall, waxes and wanes from the 1950s onward with bipolar disorder; the journalist Margaret Bourke-White undergoes radical surgery for Parkinson’s disease in 1959; Secretary of State John Foster Dulles battles colon cancer in the late 1950s while the Cold War wages; football running back Brian Piccolo’s death from cancer in 1970 is immortalized in a made-for- TV movie; civil rights lawyer Morris Abram forges his own path during the 1970s treating his leukemia with immunotherapy and is cured; actor Steve McQueen uses various unorthodox treatments for lung cancer in 1980 and dies; actress Rita Hayworth is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s around 1981, ten years (or more) after its symptoms first appeared; Barney Clarke lives for 112 days in 1982 with an artificial heart implanted in his chest and a bevy of news reporters outside his hospital; Libby Zion dies one night in 1984 in New York Hospital, and a public debate about the cause of her death ensues; the epidemic of HIV-AIDS swells during the 1980s, and Elizabeth Glaser and tennis star Arthur Ashe become pubic advocates for confronting the disease; and finally, Lorenzo Odone’s remarkable parents pioneer a novel therapy for their son’s adrenoleukodystrophy.

In Lerner’s capable hands, these dozen stories in their retelling are both colorfully dramatic narratives, ripped from the headlines (as the saying now goes) and also probing samples of historically specific contingencies and shifting attitudes. Viewed broadly, Lerner engages in three principal analytic tasks. The first task is to reconstruct, with as much fidelity as the available historical sources allow, the illness-related events that actually occurred, as opposed to the often distorted or bowdlerized story presented by the media. For instance, just before Brian Piccolo died, he most likely uttered a mild expletive of incredulity, which was omitted from the deathbed scene in the movie Brian’s Song. In the second level of analysis, Lerner then compares the alternative versions of what happened and asks why the media’s narrative was framed or altered or spun in a particular manner. An example here would be the saga of the Odones’ quest for a treatment for adrenoleukodystrophy, which, as portrayed by film director George Miller in Lorenzo’s Oil, was plotted quite consciously to conform to the archetypal pattern of the heroic myth, omitting many of the complexities of character motivations and actions that marked what actually occurred. In the final level of analysis, Lerner probes both the best historical account and the media account of each celebrity’s illness to examine how the rules of engagement change over time. Steve McQueen’s diagnosis of cancer, for example, was reported first in 1980 by the National Enquirer on the basis of information leaked by a hospital’s nurse’s aide, marking a shift in reporting away from respecting the privacy of famous patients and toward...