The hardest knife ill-used : Shakespeare's tremor -- Exil'd from light : the blindness of John Milton -- Dying from the top down : The dementia of Jonathan Swift -- Some sweet poisoned breeze had passed into her lungs : the Brontës and tuberculosis -- Dismal labyrinth of doubt : the strange death of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Perilous outpost of the sane : the many maladies of Herman Melville -- Sex and the dead : brucellosis, arsenic and William Butler Yeats -- Medical misadventures of an amateur M.D. : Jack London's death by hubris -- An infamous private ailment : the venereal afflictions of James Joyce -- "The disease which was bound to claim me sooner or later" : Orwell's cough.