2023-05-10 02:34:10
The snapshot will go down to posterity. Carlos III, crowned on May 6 after a life in the shadow of Isabel II, poses with a half smile and arms interlocked. One more royal photograph of an extensive pile that has jumped into the media this week. Or so it seemed… But the seasoned eyes of a thousand Internet users pointed to the elephant in the room that nobody was talking about: the hands of the monarch. Swollen phalanges protruded from them; the calls ‘sausage fingers‘. And it is not a joke, but a disease, the so-called dactylitis, which has jumped into the media in recent days.
Little had been known until now about this curious disease that the monarch could suffer from. Carlos III would have tried to remove her from public life to avoid the comments that, a few weeks ago, began to bubble on social networks. The truth is that her behavior should not shock her subjects, since there have been dozens of world leaders who, throughout the millennia, have hidden strange ailments. Among them is, for example, the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who suffered during the last part of his life from chronic diarrhea that he tried to alleviate with a thousand and one medications. And so, many others.
sausage fingers
Carlos III’s is a peculiar disease. This is how the authors of ‘Dactylitis‘, a dossier prepared for the Spanish Rheumatology Foundation. In his words, this ailment is defined as “inflammation of one or more fingers or toes.” And it couldn’t be more visible, as it causes swelling and redness that are impossible to hide. Nor is it innocuous for the patient, who is forced to suffer from constant pain and see his joint movement reduced. That the monarch does not suffer when holding pens or signing documents has raised some doubts about whether he really suffered from ‘sausage fingers’. The doubts are still open, and the Royal House has not yet dispelled them.
In the words of experts, dactylitis is nothing more than the body’s response to an infection. And, how could it be otherwise, it can be caused by an infinity of diseases. “There are inflammatory dactylitis (spondyloarthropathies, gout, or sarcoidosis), infectious dactylitis (tuberculosis, syphilis, or bullous distal dactylitis) or noninflammatory dactylitis (sickle cell anemia),” the authors explain. The way to put an end to it, therefore, is to attack its origin, although some are chronic and difficult to eradicate. Nor does it seem that Carlos III would have severe problems if he had ‘sausage fingers’, since the pain usually subsides with the most typical medications.
Chronic diarrhea
Carlos III can rest easy, because Thomas Jefferson also suffered a myriad of diseases in silence for years. The president, known for having orchestrated the Declaration of Independence of the United States and for having promoted the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Ocean, he suffered from migraines to dysuria. The latter, a severe pain when urinating that accompanied him until he left this world in 1826. The curious thing is that, despite accumulating a cocktail of ailments, the American was always reticent to medical remedies; something that the historian Gaye Wison corroborates in her many articles on the subject.
Of all the ills he suffered, there was one that embarrassed him in particular during the last 25 years of his life: chronic diarrhea that he tried to alleviate by all means and which, in the long run, was one of the causes that led to his death. He found it so humiliating that when he referred to it, he called it a “gut complaint.” And that, on the rare occasions when a word came out of his mouth that made reference to this evil. Not in vain, and as the historian Andrew Burstein explains in his work ‘Jefferson’s Secrets, Death and Desire at Monticello’, the politician hid this disease from his family for decades: «Until he was about to die, he did not tell his family that he had suffered periodic diarrhea since the beginning of his presidency”.
The third president of the United States also suffered from urination problems
The appearance of this disease was fortuitous. In fact, before he became president of the United States, in 1801, the politician had always boasted of having a normal intestinal transit. “I have been blessed with digestive organs that accept and elaborate, without ever murmuring, whatever the palate chooses to impose on them, and I have not yet lost a tooth due to age,” he once explained to the also founding father, doctor and friend Benjamin Rush.
That joy did not last long. After being elected as the head honcho of the United States, Jefferson began to have a series of intestinal problems that led to the appearance of chronic diarrhea. In other words, a “significant variation in the characteristics of the stools with respect to their previous stool habit, both in terms of quantity or increased frequency, and with a decrease in consistency”, as revealed by doctors M. Esteve Comas and F. Fernández Bañares in the collective work ‘Treatment of digestive diseases’.
Guillain Barre syndrome
Alexander III of Macedonia, ‘the Great’, should not be associated with illness, but with greatness. King at age 20, from 336 BC, he extended his domain in little more than a decade through Egypt, Persia and Central Asia. And not because he craved power, but because of an unquenchable thirst for adventure. “What he wanted was not riches, nor gifts, nor pleasures, but an empire that offered him combat, wars, and glory,” wrote Plutarch in the first century AD. However, his figure will always remain linked to the strange evil that ended with his life. The Greek historian recounts that, in 323 BC, the great monarch was in Babylon when “fiery fevers and deliriums” took over his body. His state of health worsened until, eleven days later, he died from severe “fever that did not subside.”
It is unknown what caused that ailment, but three possibilities are being considered: poisoning, malaria caused by bathing in swampy waters or, according to a theory put forward in 2019, a neurological disease called Guillain Barre syndrome. This last disorder can cause paralysis or, ultimately, even a deep coma; which in turn would explain why, in the words of the first-century AD historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, his body remained “incorrupt” for a week. Not because he was a demigod, as was suggested among his generals, but because Alexander had been declared prematurely dead.
Epilepsy
The great Alexander the Great died, but he became an idol for other generals like Gaius Julius Caesar. In ‘The life of the twelve Caesars’, produced in the second century AD. C., it is explained that the winner of Vercingetorix in Galia he cried with emotion in front of a monument dedicated to the Macedonian in Gades (Cádiz). Shortly after, and in nearby Córdoba, the Roman suffered the first of the attacks of a disease that accompanied him until he was assassinated: epilepsy. All the great classical historians made reference in one way or another to the fact that he suffered from this disease; from Apiano to Eutropio, among others.
Gaius Julius Caesar, the dictator who led to the arrival of the Roman Empire
Plutarch himself noted that Gaius Julius Caesar “was subject to headaches and epileptic malady.” A disease that, in his words, prevented him from fighting in the battle of Thapso: «Some say that Caesar was not found in action, because when ordering and forming the troops he felt embittered by his usual illness; and? […], before reaching the state of perturbation and losing consciousness, although already with some convulsion, he had himself taken to a castle of those who were nearby, and in that retreat his illness passed. In recent years, several studies have linked the dictator’s disease with cerebral sclerosis or excessive intake of alcoholic beverages.
cow heart
Manuel Azaña also suffered from a disease that he kept secret in the last moments of his life. In February 1940, the president, who was residing in Pyla-sur-Mer, had been ailing for a while. He had pain and discomfort in his chest and his fatigue was increasing. He must have seen the Grim Reaper nearby, because, despite the fact that in principle he refused to be visited by a doctor, he ended up accepting the proposal of his brother-in-law and allowed himself to be examined. The one chosen for this was Dr. Monod, from a family that his brother-in-law, Rivas Cherif, described as “illustrious in France” and “very particularly in history.”
«The former president agreed as if apologizing that we had called him for such an unimportant thing in his opinion; I don’t know if deep down in his mind he didn’t feel the concern, or he wanted to drive it away by ignoring his own aches and pains. The one that alarmed me the most was the one he said in the upper part of his chest, almost in his throat, every time he, sitting on an armchair, leaned back ».
After examining the patient, Monod corroborated that he suffered a “very important heart lesion, of years, without a doubt.” Although he urged him to see other specialists to confirm it, he did not want the family to have any illusions and explained that “that first investigation was certain enough to confirm that the aorta and heart were extremely dilated.” There was no solution. The pain and symptoms could only be alleviated with constant rest and rest. “He had what French doctors call coeur de beuf and Spanish doctors call cow’s heart,” Cherif explained. That led to his grave on November 3, 1940.
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