Whom the Gods Love Die Young (review)

In Whom the Gods Love Die Young, Roy Macbeth Pitkin, M.D. endeavors to use "the life and death of well-known historical figures who died before forty to introduce the illnesses of which they died, and . . . then proceed to outline advances in the understanding, diagnosis, and therapy since" (back cover). He largely fulfills his mission through a series of brief, informative, and beautifully written biographical sketches of some of the most fascinating personalities of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries (Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Princess Charlotte, Charlotte Brontë, Stephen Crane, Rudy Valentino, Lou Gehrig, Jean Harlow, Eva Perón, and Mario Lanza).

In their particular fields, the subjects of Pitkin's book were among the most important figures of their eras. Even so, I must confess, except for Mario Lanza (whose illness I had previously investigated), I knew almost nothing of these famous patients prior to reading Whom the Gods Love Die Young. Therefore, for me, the book was both an enlightening and pleasurable read.

In it, Pitkin offers his reader compressed, though highly informative, accounts of the lives and legacies of his famous subjects. Intimate details populating the ten mini-biographies are all the more engaging because Pitkin is neither sensational nor judgmental in his biographical critiques. Since only rarely does he resort to hyperbole in promoting the importance of his subjects and their disorders, he can be forgiven for occasional instances of excessive exuberance, such as buttressing his bipolar diagnosis in Byron by claiming that, "There are few well-known poets who did not have at least some suggestion of bipolar disorder" (37); rating Eva Pero´n as "arguably the most powerful female political figure of the 20th century" (150); and declaiming "The heart [as] the most vital of the body's vital organs" (177) in introducing coronary artery disease as Mario Lanza's fatal disorder.

In considering possible etiologies of the illnesses of his subjects, Pitkin offers mini tutorials on a series of disorders that lay readers will find eminently understandable and left me in awe of the author's uncommon ability to simplify and elucidate complex medical concepts. Pitkin is an obstetrician/gynecologist and is at his best explaining the fundaments of disorders of the female genital tract. His description of the causes and consequences of postpartum hemorrhage (which took the life of Princess Charlotte) is masterful. He is no less eloquent in his discussions of rheumatic heart disease (Burns), malaria (Byron), hyperemesis gravidarium (Brontë), tuberculosis (Crane), and amyotropic lateral sclerosis (Gehrig). These discussions, in fact, are so consistently accurate and lucid, one is inclined to excuse occasional misinformation offered, such as the clinical thermometer was invented in 1870 (rather than in 1592 by Galileo Galilei); typhoid fever manifests almost entirely as diarrhea (when constipation is more common); and Lanza was 5´10˝ tall and his electrocardiogram (EKG) showed evidence of cardiac damage (though the tenor was actually 5´7˝ and the EKG in question was, in fact, normal).

These minor deficiencies aside, the book's principal disappointment is that it provides so little clinical information supporting the diagnoses given to the ten famous patients. In Burns case, for example, Pitkin diagnoses acute rheumatic fever solely on the basis of a statement by the poet's brother that "At this time he was almost constantly affected in the evenings with palpitation of the heart, and a threatening of fainting and suffocation in the night time" (20). Pitkin labels Byron bipolar simply because he was "a person of tumultuous and contrasting passions who could variously be idle and furiously productive, ascetic and libertine, aristocratic and republican, idealistic and crass, tempestuous and pensive" (36). Moreover, he seems to imply that a family history of any psychosocial aberration predisposes one to bipolar disorder in suggesting that Byron likely inherited a "double dose" of the bipolar trait because "both maternal and paternal lineages are littered with individuals whose behavior was nothing if...