COLLOQUIUM: Bret Mulligan, Haverford, "Disease as Metaphor"

Disease often served as a potent metaphor for deficient character in antiquity. This phenomenon is explored through a canvassing of poetic, philosophical, and technical works that describe a target as gouty. This accusation often carried with it a moralizing charge that locates the subject in familiar categories of excessive consumption and decadence opposed to an ideal of moderation. Gout’s pain and grotesqueness furnish visible external markers of the afflicted subject’s inner deficiency and can even be understood as just retribution for the moral deficiency of the diseased. Discussion of how gout’s physical discomfort can be treated comically—both as insult and solace—leads to the final section of the paper, which explicates the metaphorical implications of gout in poems by Catullus and Claudian, among other authors.