Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Samuel Johnson's early life

Johnson TS

These are all sources used in discussing Johnson and Tourette Syndrome on Wikipedia (either on the TS page, on Johnson's bio, his health page, or the early life page). These are quoted for educational purposes only and are used to show the whole statement of the individual as to make sure their argument can be made clear. This is not an attempt to deprive the individuals of any ability to earn from their copyrighted works but to ensure that they are not misunderstood.

Wilshire

Wiltshire Samuel Johnson in the Medical World 1991:

pp. 28–34 - Whether one should give a medical account of behaviour depends obviously enough on the observer's sense of the limits of the normal or acceptable. Rolling or see-sawing movements whilst one's concentration is absorbed should hardly be called pathological. An early study of the subject, Meige and Feindel's Tics and their Treatment (translated in 1907) makes this useful distinction [...] Meige and Feindel, as disciples of Charcot, perceived ticqueurs as degenerate, suffers from 'mental infatilism, and extolled the power of the will [...] 'The intensity and tenacity of any tic are determined by the degree of volitional imperfection to which its subject has sunk. He who can will can effect a cure; be it simple tic, or be it a case of Gilles de la Tourette's disease...'⁸⁴ Gilles de la Tourette syndrome was named by Charcot after his pupil who first (1885) published an account of nine patients [...] It has also been proposed as a means of collecting together and explaining Johnson's varied symptoms, the latest and in some ways the most persuasive assertion of medical explanatory power over Johnson's behaviour.

First suggested, in passing, as a possibility, in 1967 by McHenry, a comprehensive study of the disorder in 1978 (A. K. Shapiro et al., Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome) declares that 'Samuel Johnson... is the most notable example of a successful adaptation to life despite the liability of Tourette syndrome', though the authors repeatedly stress the difficulty of making a diagnosis of the syndrome even on contemporary patients. A Canadian physician, T. J. Murray, published an article in 1979 in the British Medical Journal arguing that Johnson's abnormal movements constitute the clinical picture of Tourette syndrome, and this conclusion has been widely publicised.⁸⁶ TS begins in choldhood, often with single tics - rapid, repeated, involuntary movements - of the eye and face; in time the movements tend to spread downwards, so that odd jerkings of the shoulders and the trunk occur simultaneously as well as other varieties of movement. These involuntary gestures are always associated with disorders of speech: most often the patient will feel compelled to utter obscenities ('coprolalia') or will make grunting, snorting, barking or screaming noises in the midst of ordinary speech. In some instances the patient will be compelled to mutter sequences of sounds, or end their speech with an expiratory hiss. The symptoms may tend to 'wax and wane', patients being relatively free of them for considerable periods. They can also control the tics to some degree at least: tic-ing children, when brought to the doctor's surgery, for instance, often behave quite normally, to the consternation of their parents. 'Absorption in a non-anxious task' will also relieve the tics. It is when the patient is relaxed, as when watchint television, that the movements become most marked. Shapiro argues that TS is not a psychological disease and on the evidence of controlled psychological testing of patients, he finds that it is not necessarily associated either with obsessive-compulsive character traints, or with the inhibition of aggressive impulses (two favourite earlier hypotheses). [...] Johnson too, would insist, despite the implication of phrases like 'paralytic affection' or 'morbid infection', that he had connived or fostered his symptoms. [...] But if one thinks of Johnson's own abnormal behaviours, as described by Boswell, for instance, it is scarcely conceivable that such a constellation of symptoms could be defeated except by the exertion of such energy, or force of will - maintained continuously - as virtually to change the nature of the person, or at least tax their resources in a way that leaves little energy left for other functions (for example, thought). If we view them in this, admittedly pragmatic, light, Johnson's movements come to have almost a benign quality. Johnson's condemnation (and Reynolds', who in this respect is a disciple) is founded upon a hard and fast distinction between voluntary and involuntary acts. [...] There are other difficulties in the way of accepting a diagnosis of Gilles de la Tourette syndrome. Whilst one cannot be certain, with W. J. Bate, that Johnson's 'embarrasing tics and other compulsive mannerisms' developed in the 1729-31 crisis, there is little convincing evidence that peculiarities in Johnson's behaviour were noticed in youth.⁹⁵ If Johnson's own statement that his 'unease' began in his twentieth year is accepted as including, though not necessarily comprehending, these symptoms, then this would make the onset of the disorder extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely, late. The fact that Johnson did not suffer from coprolalia need not preclude a diagnosis of TS since only 55 per cent of patients do in fact show this symptom. On the other hand, there is good evidence that Johnson's mouth movements and mutters were forms of prayer, and they certainly did not interrupt normal speech. [...] These rituals do seem peculiarly difficult to explain as straightforward results or extensions of neurological disease, though parallel cases of 'arithomania' occur in discussion of various forms of tics. [...] Such acts may, conceivably, be invented by the sufferer and have a diversionary or therapeutic relation to an original disease or disturbance. Alternatively, they may be thought to take their roots in the same 'unease'. Certainly, if, with Russell Brain and other physicians who have studied the evidence one rejects neurological disease as an explanation for Johnson's behaviour, a problem remains 'His movement and psychological disturbances were not on the basis of brain anoxia or cerebral palsy, but were manifestations of his underlying psychological make-up', concludes McHenry.¹⁰⁰ This gap in the explanation of Johnson's behaviour has been readily filled by psychoanalytic account.

Footnotes:

• 84 - Meige and Feindel, Tics p 57
• 86 - McHenry, "Samuel Johnson's tics and gesticulations', pp. 153, 159; A. K. Shapiro, E. S. Shapiro, R. D. Brunn and R. D. Sweet, Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome (New York, 1978) p. 361; T. J. Murray, "Doctor Samuel Johnson's movement disorders", British Medical Journal 1 (1979), 1, 610-14; "Doctor Johnson's abnormal movements", in Arnold J. Friedhoof and Thomas N. Chase (eds), Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome (New York, 1982) pp. 25-30
• 95 - W. J. Bate Samuel Johnson (1978) p. 125)
• 100 - Russel Brain, "The great convulsionary" in Some Reflections on Genius and other Essays (1960) p. 69; McHenry "Samuel Johnson's tics and gesticulations" p. 164 [...] (R. Macdonald Ladell, "The neurosis of Dr Samuel Johnson", British Journal of Medical Psychology 9 (1929) 314-23, p. 321) [...] Edward Hitschmann, "Samuel Johnson's character, a psychoanalytic interpretation

", Psychoanalytic Review 32 (1945) 208-18 p. 212). These articles are critically discussed in William Kennedy, "Dr Johnson and the psychiatrists", American Imago 17 (Spring 1960, 75-82)...

Demaria

Demaria The Life of Samuel Johnson 1994:

pp. 5-6 By the age of eight Johnson also began showing the signs of an unidentified nervous disorder that modern medicine might have diagnosed as Tourette's syndrome. The tics and gesticulations noted by all of Johnson's biographers, as well as the involuntary vocalizations, repetitions of other's remarks, and the comnpulsive, ritualized movements when entering a room or walking on pavement with cracks, all suggest the disease named after its nineteenth-century discoverer, Gilles de la Tourette. This syndrome, along with his other disorders, had damaging effects on Johnson's personal and professional lives. His applications to teach in established schools in Solihull and Brentwood and his attempt to run his own school at Edial, for example, were almost certainly ruined by his physical appearance. His failure would have been likely today, and it was almost inevitable in any age that followed Locke's prescription of a tutor who served most importantly as a model of behaviour and deportment for the pupil. Johnson's physical condition may, however, have conferred on him some benefits along with its obvious liabilities. His incapacity to work in more public positions happily pressed Johnson towards the invisible occupation of authorship. In addition, as Oliver Sacks has shown, Tourette's syndrome, with all its debilitations, occasionally lends its victims great verbal and vocal energy; those who can harness this energy sometimes perform with superior strength and speed. The most wonderful suggestion that Johnson enjoyed such extraordinary power occurs in Boswell's account of Hogarth's visit to Samuel Richards's house [...] Diagnosing the disease of the deed is absurd, of course, and there is an anarchronism in superimposing on them our age's medical terminology, but something like Tourette's syndrome would explain both Johnson's reticence and his explosive power as a talker, as wall as various symptoms of his movement disorder. Tourette's syndrome is associated with psychological causes, like suppressed rage, that are evident in Johnson's personality, but the illness is neurological and clearly as a biochemical basis: the onset is usually preceded by physical weakness, such as might be caused by scrofula, and the disease is now successfully treated with a drug called haloperidol. Although it is problematic in its own right, diagnosis Johnson's case as Tourette syndrome has the pleasing effect of short-circuiting effforts to superimpose on him an anachronistic Freudian interpretation of his behaviour. Such features of his behaviour as verbal overkill [...]

p. 9. If Johnson's neurological disorder was Tourette's syndrome, his troulbes were probably heightened by the solitude and anxiety that accompany the private productions of writing. Bodily laziness is also a symptom of the disease, and Johnson may have felt a neurological resistance to the physical engagement of writing [...]

p. 24 Like other swufferers of Tourette's or related syndromes, Johnson experienced wide swings in mood and energy. From 1730 to 1734 he felt serious depression, melancholy, and even occasional madness. [...]

Footnotes:

• 10 - On the early appearance of symtpoms see Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings 10: 84. For a diagnosis see T. J. Murray, "Dr Samuel Johnson's Movement Disorder" British Medical Journal 1 (19729) 1610-14. On the nature of the disease see Oliver Sacks, The Main who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and other Clinical Tales (1985 [...]) and Shapiro et al "The Symptomology and Diagnosis of Gilles de la Tourette's Syndrome" Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 12 (1973) 702-23. [...]

Martin

Martin Samuel Johnson: A Biography 2008: p. 37 - Hawkins's gentle encouragement was crucial because at the age of seven the boy's large frame, scrofula-scarred features, severely limited eyesight and increasing odd gesticulations and movements, not to mention what Mrs Thrale described as his sullen and reserved disposition, were at first surely likely to make him the butt of his classmates' jokes.

94 - There was also a disconcerting new feature of his behaviour which must have worried everyone. As a result of his physical illness he began to show signs of the 'tics and gesticulations' that stayed with him for the rest of his life.¹

pp. 325 - It is now widely suspected that these movement disorders were symptoms of what has become known as the neurological disease that some now call Tourette's Syndrome, except without the extremes of profanity that often character it.²⁶

By the time Boswell had met Johnson, it is possible that these jerks, gesticulations and other movement disorders had become even more severe and astonishing to onlookers. [...]

Footnotes:

• 1 - See Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr "Samuel johnson's tics and gesticulations" Journal of the History of Notes to Pages 000-000 Medicine and Allied Sciences 22 (1967) pp. 152-68
• 26 - [...] On Tourette's Syndrome, see Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr. "Samuel Johnson's tics and gesticulations" Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 22 (1967) pp. 152-68), Wiltshire Samuel Johnson in the Medical World pp. 24-34, and T. J. Murray "Doctor Samuel Johnson's Movement Disorders" British Medical Journal I (1979) pp. 1, 610-14

More sources

There are plenty of other sources on this, but I just spent the past two hours transcribing these sections. I'm not in the mood to continue and this is already stretching the boundaries of fair use. Sandy can provide the more technical sources on the issue if necessary. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:28, 16 March 2009 (UTC)