Samuel Johnson's Struggles with Tourrete's

Emily Smith, over at Cambridge's Varsity, offers her first entry in an eight-part feature on writers and their illnesses, beginning with Samuel Johnson, who suffered from Tourrete's.

Given he found fame by compiling the first comprehensive English dictionary, it might seem ironic that Johnson almost certainly suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome – a condition that is associated in many people’s minds with inappropriate use of expletives. Contrary to popular belief, however, this symptom is actually quite rare in Tourette’s sufferers. Johnson is not documented as having suffered from uncontrollable swearing; in fact, his biographer James Boswell describes one of his vocal ‘tics’ as “frequently uttering pious ejaculations”, such as fragments of the Lord’s Prayer. Such vocal tics, together with motor tics (repetitive movements such as mouth opening or head nodding), form part of the modern-day diagnostic criteria for the condition, as defined in the psychiatrist’s handbook, DSM-IV.

Johnson never wrote about his condition, but this has not stopped others from speculating about its effects on his life. Accounts by contemporaries, such as Alexander Pope, suggest that Tourette’s prevented his employment as a headmaster, because it was believed that his tics would be too distracting to pupils.

Read the rest after the jump.