title: An Alarming History of Famous and Difficult Patients: Amusing Medical Anecdotes from Typhoid Mary to FDR
author:  Richard Gordon 
description: Queen Victoria tended to plumpness, yet when one of her doctors suggested a reducing diet, she objected until she conceived a suitable compromise: adding the diet to her regular intake! Those already acquainted with Gordon's writing, in the venerable British humor magazine <i>Punch</i> or any of his 45 books, know his clever literary allusions, delightful wit, and amusing contradictions and ironies (e.g., this opening sentence: "Paganini became a difficult patient only when he was dead"). As in his other works, his historical knowledge herein proves solid, often surprising, and always pertinent. You may think that George Washington, Hitler, FDR, Boswell, Whitman, Shaw, and similar worthies have probably had their medical histories worked to death, so to speak, but such is not the case. Gordon consistently comes up with remarkable details and presents them in an enlightening and enjoyable manner, making of them one of those rare books to be gulped whole or consumed in bits and pieces with equal pleasure. <i>William Beatty</i>
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  ![Cover](images/cover.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## The Shadowy Third
  
  
    
  
  
  ### Ellen Glasgow
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  When the call came I remember that I turned from the telephone in a romantic
  flutter. Though I had spoken only once to the great surgeon, Roland Maradick,
  I felt on that December afternoon that to speak to him only once — to watch
  him in the operating-room for a single hour — was an adventure which drained
  the color and the excitement from the rest of life. After all these years of
  work on typhoid and pneumonia cases, I can still feel the delicious tremor of
  my young pulses; I can still see the winter sunshine slanting through the
  hospital windows over the white uniforms of the nurses.
  
  
  "He didn’t mention me by name. Can there be a mistake?" I stood, incredulous
  yet ecstatic, before the superintendent of the hospital.
  
  
  "No, there isn’t a mistake. I was talking to him before you came down." Miss
  Hemphill’s strong face softened while she looked at me. 