This article was in the Oakland Tribune dated September 15 1974 by Herbert Kupferberg.

What do Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, John Milton, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt and Hank Greenberg all have in common? The answer—in one word—is gout, a crippling disease which everybody laughs at except people who suffer from it.

The approximately one million gout victims in the U.S. don't see anything funny in their affliction. Seizures, which often come upon them in the middle of the night, cause excruciating pain, generally centered in the region of the big toe. "I feel," said the gout-ridden British essayist Sydney Smith, "as if I am walking on my eyeballs." Gout has been known to man ever since the ancient Egyptians. The Greeks even had a word for it. Hippocrates, their great physician, called it "podagra," from the Greek words pous (foot) and agra (attack).

After suffering from gout for centuries, the human race at last is doing something about it. More progress has been made in its treatment and control during the last 25 years than in the previous 3000. In fact, some of the knowledge gleaned from the study of gout is now being applied to research in such other medical problems as arthritis, diabetes and heart disease. Pain-free lives Treatment of gout itself has reached the point where patients can lead normal, pain-free lives with only minimal restrictions on their eating and drinking habits. The old "gout stool," on which sufferers used to rest their throbbing, bandaged foot, is rapidly passing into obsolescence.