John Milton (1608-1674)

"A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life" (John Milton, Areopagitica)

Perhaps the greatest ever unread English poet? At school, Milton was on the English syllabus alongside Shakespeare, and so we studied two books of Paradise Lost for A Level, just as we had studied two books of Virgil for Latin O Level, and with as little enthusiasm. Whereas I had been forced to memorise my Virgil to pass the exam, being an incompetent classisist, I cannot even remember which books of Paradise Lost we were to read. Only the opening, itself so Virgilian, remains familiar:

"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the world, and all our woe"

I did remember that Milton saved his best lines for Satan, and was accused of "being of the Devil's party" as a result. We were scarcely enlightened, at my English public school, as to his Civil War radicalism.

Philip Pullman, in ransacking Paradise Lost for the framework and title of his own epic, His Dark Materials, did us all a service in reminding us that Milton is still there on the shelf, and perhaps worth reading for his own sake. In my case, a talking book took the 10,000 lines of blank verse - or at least the best bits - off the page and into my consciousness. And what a rich and splendid feast of imagery and language it is! I am sure someone else has already pointed out that John Milton is the first fantasy writer in the English language, creating imaginative worlds, complete with monsters, treachery, romance and suspense, three hundred years before Tolkien. In contrast to his peers, he used a wider vocabulary, freer and more exciting rhythms and above all no rhyming. Dramatic, irreverent (angels having sex?), could anything more ambitious be attempted than to describe the defeat of the rebel angels followed by the fall of man?

Like Tolkien, Milton was a language scholar, with Latin, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian and a little Dutch at his fingertips. Born in London, the son of a composer and scrivener of Cheapside, Milton went to Cambridge, where he thought student life of the time mostly foolish. In return, he was known as the "Lady of Christ's" due to his long hair. After college, which he found intellectually rather limiting, he continued to read widely in preparation for a poetic career. From 1638, he toured France and Italy for an extended gap year, meeting Galileo in Italy and I'm glad to note also spending time in Geneva. Returning to England, he became a polemical writer in the service of the Parliamentary cause, and after the revolution was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues in 1649, responsible for Latin foreign correspondence and with a sideline in anti-royalist propaganda, also in Latin.

Family life was turbulent: Milton was married three times, and was an early polemicist in favour of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. Anne and Mary, his daughters by his first wife, rebelled against him - probably because he ignored their needs, no doubt also because he forced them to read to him in languages they did not understand. Samuel Johnson accused him of being severe and arbitrary and to have viewed women as inferior. When Milton married again, he did not bother to let his daughters know. Informed by a servant, Mary apparently replied, "that was no news to hear of his wedding but if she could hear of his death that was something".

By 1654, glaucoma had rendered John Milton totally blind, and from then on his poetry had to be dictated to helpers, who included the poet Andrew Marvell: it was in these conditions that he composed Paradise Lost, which finally appeared in 1667. In one of his shorter poems, On his blindness, Milton asks how he can now serve God, "When I consider how my light is spent", receiving the answer that to bear his "mild yoke" would be best, and concluding with the famous consolation that "They also serve who only stand and wait." Later, in Samson Agonistes, he would write of the Biblical hero

"But he though blind of sight,

Despised and thought extinguished quite,

With inward eyes illuminated,

His fiery virtue roused

From under ashes into sudden flame,"

The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 saw him imprisoned for a time, and thereafter leading a quiet and impoverished life in London, retiring to rural Buckinghamshire for a year to escape the Plague. Milton's despair at the end of the Commonwealth is perhaps reflected in Paradise Lost's theme of man's fall from grace. Theologically, Milton was a sophisticated and independent thinker, and in his later life he came closest to Quakers in his approach to religion.

It's ironic, looking at the website for John Milton's cottage at Chalfont St Giles, to see that it celebrates "Royal Interest", from Queen Victoria who started the subscription list to purchase the property for the nation, to the half dozen current royals who have visited. Politically, John Milton was a supporter of regicide, a firm republican and an advocate of liberty, calling in the anti-censorship tract Areopagitica for " the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties". A later radical poet, young William Wordsworth, would write a sonnet beginning:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:


England hath need of thee: she is a fen


Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,


Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,


Have forfeited their ancient English dower


Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;


Oh! raise us up, return to us again;


And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Less lyrically, Terry Eagleton once maintained (to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory):

Chaucer was a class traitor

Shakespeare hated the mob

Donne sold out a bit later,

Sidney was a nob

There are only three names

To be plucked from this dismal set

Milton, Blake and Shelley

Will smash the ruling class yet.

Samuel Johnson noted that Paradise Lost was "one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is". Access to Milton's greatest work is now rather easier for lazy moderns thanks to audio book, which seems appropriate given that he never read it on the page himself. If there was ever a poem which benefitted from being read aloud, it was Paradise Lost.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928-1967)

"The true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary who does not have this quality."

Ernesto "Che" Guevara Lynch was born in Misiones, a remote jungle backwater in Argentina to aristocratic but radical parents: his father said "in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels". Ernesto was diagnosed asthmatic at the age of two. Whereas his condition was chronic in Buenos Aires, when they moved to Alta Gracia, a dry highland province, it stabilised. His parents monitored his health, the humidity, his clothing and diet in an attempt to reduce the severity of the symptoms. Even as a child, it is said that he "showed an unusually strong self discipline by adhering to his asthma diets".

Often his parents made him stay at home, for fear of an attack. He became a precocious reader, as this was one of the only things he could do when asthma struck. The family home contained more than 3,000 books and Guevara read very widely in world literature, politics and poetry. He would make handwritten notebooks of notes and quotations from his favourite authors. Later, he was a prolific writer and diarist.

At school, he displayed a fiercely competitive personality, perhaps as compensation for his sickliness. Despite his illness, Guevara was an excellent sportsman - rugby, athletics, cycling, shooting were all activities into which he poured all of his energies.

In 1948, he began to study medicine at Buenos Aires University. In his vacations, he made his famous trips by motorcycle through Argentina, Chile and Peru. On these journeys, he encountered the poor and dispossessed - lepers, workers, peasants - with whom he identified and whose cause he subsequently passionately espoused. By 1953 he had graduated as Dr Ernesto Guevara.

In 1954 in Guatemala, he experienced the overthrow of the Arbenz regime by the CIA on behalf of the United Fruit Company, and this contributed to his hatred of American imperialism. At this time also, Guevara came into contact with Fidel Castro and other Cuban exiles. Subsequently, Guevara trained in guerilla warfare in Mexico, prior to the 1956 assault on Cuba with the band of revolutionaries who embarked aboard the Granma.

Commandante Guevara was second only to Castro in the revolutionary movement, and played a major role in the Cuban revolution. In the guerilla campaign in the mountains, the two contradictory sides of Guevara's personality were demonstrated: his love and care for his fighters, whom he helped to educate and entertain, but also his ruthlessness, for example in shooting informers, deserters and spies. As a military leader, he was intelligent and brave, with a tendency towards foolhardiness, according to his leader Castro. By 1959, the dictator Batista had fled and the Castro regime took over. In the following months, Guevara commanded the La Cabana prison, and was responsible for exacting revolutionary justice against the war criminals and others from the old regime. Commandate Guevara told the tribunals

“Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary. We must act through conviction. We’re dealing with a bunch of criminals and assassins.”

Several hundred prisoners were shot as Guevara watched from on top of a wall, lying on his back, cigar in mouth, to encourage the firing squads.

Che Guevara proved to be less effective as an economic leader than a military one. He became president of the Cuban national bank, with his signature "Che" on the bank notes signalling his distaste for money. However, he had more success with the Cuban Literacy Campaign, which taught more than 700,000 people to read and write. In 1962, he was one of the main architects of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he was seemingly unconcerned at the risk of "millions of atomic war victims". Speaking at the United Nations in 1964, Guevara denounced apartheid, imperialism and the poverty of the Latin American masses. However, he rejected the pro-Soviet tendency in global and Cuban politics, and his thinking had moved towards a Maoist approach. Perhaps partly for that reason, he decided to leave Cuba

First, Che Guevara travelled to Congo, unsuccessfully trying to promote resistance to Mobutu. He blamed incompetence and in-fighting for the failure. After that, he offered his services to FRELIMO in Mozambique, but they were declined. In 1966, following his disappointments in Africa, Guevara disguised himself, and went to promote revolution in Bolivia. But perhaps because he favoured conflict to compromise, he was unable to develop good relations with local leaders. In addition, he was now up against the CIA and US Special Forces, his men lacked training and equipment, and his radio communications had failed. In the jungle, he became increasingly ill with asthma, having to make guerilla raids just to obtain medicine. Finally, he was taken captive by Bolivian special forces. On October 9, 1969 he was executed on orders of the Bolivian President. A half-drunken sergeant shot him nine times, so that the authorities could say that Guevara had been killed trying to escape. CIA men were in close attendance.

In death, Guevara became a hero. The photographs of his bearded corpse made him appear Christlike. Jean Paul-Sartre, Susan Sontag, Nelson Mandela and many others have regarded him as a hero and an inspiration, a man who was prepared to die for his beliefs. Thanks to the 1968 image by Jim Fitzpatrick, he became an icon of teenage rebellion and fashion chic. Reminiscent of his adolescent reading of Jack London, he was the epitome of the macho adventurer.

I became a schoolboy communist after reading Lenin and the Bolsheviks by Adam B Ulam, trying, like Ernesto, to cast off my bourgeois origins and express solidarity with the dispossessed. As an activist, it felt as if Guevara could be reclaimed as a disabled hero, a symbol for a movement with transformative aspirations and revolutionary rhetoric. Later, the darker side of Che Guevara's personality and actions became repugnant to me, just as the binaries of leftism and disability radicalism had become unconvincing.

In his last letter to his children, Guevara had written "Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary." In such quotations, Che Guevara indeed comes across as a symbol of freedom and compassion. Yet in practice, he was also a brutal man, capable of executing one individual or many in cold blood, without any qualms. An early fan of Nietszche, he embraced death and despised weakness. Some have suggested that his brutality may partly have been related to his disability. Because he had fought against his asthma, suppressed his own needs and triumphed through an act of will, Guevara showed no patience or forgiveness for the frailty of others. The man who trained as a doctor ended up as a ruthless killer.

Paul Klee (1879-1940)

Orson Welles contrasted Florence under the Borgias producing Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance with peaceful Switzerland only ever having produced the cuckoo clock. But Alberto Giacometti, Jean Tinguely and Paul Klee in the twentieth century alone refute Welles. The pedant might point out that although Klee was born in Bern and died in Locarno and had a Swiss mother, he inherited German citizenship from his father and was only accorded the privilege of Swiss nationality six days after his death. By the same token, it could be queried whether, if an artist is disabled for his last five years, he can be classified as a disabled artist? The same question could be asked of Francisco Goya, who became deaf in his later years. In both examples, as perhaps also with David Hockney's deafness, the disability has an impact on the work, although the art historians seem rarely to have acknowledged or discussed this aspect of the biography.

From the start, Paul Klee was a natural at drawing. He described it most memorably himself: "A line comes into being. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk." Colour was more of a struggle. In the early years of the century he lived in Munich where his wife Lily gave piano lessons and he was a house husband and kept on with his art work. After travelling to Tunisia in 1914, he wrote "colour has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever." After 12 years of experiment he was now able, on 16 April 1914, to write in his diary "I am a painter".

During the First World War, he managed to avoid the fighting. In 1918, he was briefly involved in the Bavarian Soviet uprising, before fleeing to Switzerland. In the 1920s he moved to Weimar to teach at the Bauhaus school of art for 10 years.

Music was at least as important to Klee as painting, and early in his career it was not certain whether he would be an artist or a musician. He wrote: "I embrace the oil-scented goddess of the brush only because she is my wife" - but also that to him music was "my beloved". Paul Klee treated colours like notes in music. He said to his students at the Bauhaus "To paint well is simply this: to put the right colour in the right place." Rhythm too is of supreme importance in his work. The poet Rilke said in 1921 “Even if you hadn’t told me he plays the violin, I would have guessed that on many occasions his drawings were transcriptions of music.”

When the Nazis came to power, Klee was dismissed and the Bauhaus school was closed down. Later, he was labeled a degenerate artist. But Klee had already emigrated to Switzerland in 1933. In 1935 he contracted measles, and this developed into scleroderma, diagnosed in 1936. This condition is a chronic systemic autoimmune disease, predominantly affecting the skin, but also the heart, long and kidneys.

In the initial crisis, Klee's creative output fell away, but he then rallied to continue his prodigious output, with the year before his death being his most prolific. His movement now restricted, he could no longer simply "take a line for a walk", but a new sense of rhythm took over. The later work can be dark and threatening, perhaps influenced by his personal suffering as well as by the wider context of war. For example, in his last year, his "Eidola" series of drawings depict archetypal figures existing in a realm between life and death. Still, Klee's art retained its sense of childlike experimentation, for example in a painting like "Children's game".

In 1924, Klee had aspired to create a diverse and broad body of work "spanning all the way across element, object, content, and style". His success meant that he began many lines of enquiry which others went on to develop further. Beginning with his Bauhaus students, he was influential on many artists, from Joan Miro to Bridget Riley and beyond. He wrote extensively, responsible for many memorable insights on art, among which most famously

"art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible."

I like particularly a photograph of Klee from 1935. He is standing next to his wife Lily, wearing his dressing gown and holding his pipe. He has the trace of a smile on his face, and his cat, Bimbo, is climbing down from his shoulders. His paintings are often suffused with a sense of joy, just as he once wrote "the picture has no particular purpose. It only has the purpose of making us happy". Perhaps for this reason, as Christine Hopfengart has written, Paul Klee's work is not only admired or valued, but is loved.

Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727)

“I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, whilest the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Born prematurely, and abandoned by his mother at the age of three, Isaac Newton’s childhood was unhappy, and he was described as idle and inattentive at school. But he had a passion for learning, and eventually in 1661 went to Trinity College Cambridge, intending to get a law degree. There he became interested in astrononomy, physics and then maths, entering his thoughts in a notebook entitled Certain Philosophical Questions, in which he also wrote “"Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth".

When Cambridge University was closed because of the plague, he went back home to Lincolnshire, and spent two years reading books on mathematics, returning to become a Fellow in 1667. In 1669 he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, using his first lectures to demonstrate that white light was actually a mixture of the spectrum of colours. When he donated one of his new reflecting telescopes to the Royal Society, they elected him a Fellow. By 1666 he had developed the theory of universal gravitation: “... all matter attracts all other matter with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.”

In 1687 Newton finally published The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, usually known as Principia Mathematica, which showed how his laws of motion explained the movements of the planets and other heavenly bodies. Berlinski writes “Nothing like the Principia had ever appeared before the seventeenth century; and in truth, nothing like the Principia has ever appeared afterward. In very large measure, it was the Principia that ignited the furious dark energies that brought mathematical physics into existence and that have sustained its fires for more than three hundred years.” Newton’s universe is mathematical, proceeding like a clock due to universal laws. Sadly, the story of the apple falling on his head is probably a myth.

Newton had a complex personality. He wanted fame, but feared criticism – which meant that often he avoided publishing his results. He was anxious and insecure. Aside from his mother, and the niece to whom he was guardian, he seems to have had no emotional connection with women. He had ferocious arguments with colleagues and rivals such as Hooke and Leibniz, accusing the latter of plagiarising his discovery of “fluxion” (which Leibniz named differential calculus). In Geneva, I was delighted to find, in the wonderful Bodmer Library, Leibntiz’s own copy of the Principia, heavily annotated. Newton’s assistant Whiston said that “ Newton was of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew”.

Deeply religious, Newton studied philosophy and theology and astrology as well as science. He devoted years of his life and many thousands of words to esoteric investigations into the philosopher’s stone, transmutation and the elixir of life. John Maynard Keynes described him as “the last of the magicians”, and as someone who “regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty”. Newton was particularly interested in the form and dimensions of Solomon’s Temple, as described in the Bible, and also tried to reconcile classical mythology with the Biblical account. A staunch, if unorthodox, Protestant, he had opposed James II and welcomed the victory of William of Orange. He represented Cambridge University in the Parliament of 1689.

In 1678, Newton had a nervous breakdown, and avoided mixing with other people. In 1693, after the death of his mother, he had a second breakdown, during which he sent wild accusatory letters to his friends John Locke and Samuel Pepys. From then on, he retired from research. In 1696, he moved to London to work for the Royal Mint, becoming Master in 1699, in particular pursuing counterfeiters with his characteristic rage. In 1703 he was elected President of the Royal Society. As he got older, he became fatter and more languid, surrounding himself with bright young men who edited new editions of his work, but speaking very little in public. Probably the greatest of British scientists, he was the first to be knighted, and the first to be buried in Westminster Abbey. But his most famous quotations show his humility: in a letter to Robert Hooke he wrote: “If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants”:

Isaac Newton is claimed on various different lists of people with disabilities as having epilepsy, a stutter, or some sort of mental illness – depression, bipolar disorder or perhaps Asperger’s Syndrome. He was certainly a solitary individual, with a great capacity for sustained concentration, and a brilliantly intuitive mind. Rather obsessive, he risked blindness by staring at the sun reflected in a looking glass, and at one point inserted a bodkin (needle) into his eye socket, between eyeball and bone. Although there is considerable debate over the nature of his health problems, a contribution to his personality could be mercury poisoning, caused by his chemical research, which can cause hyperactivity, insomnia and irritability, all of which were characteristic of him.

Further reading

James Gleick, Isaac Newton, Pantheon, 2003.

David Berlinski, Newton’s Gift, Free Press, 2002.

Claudius (10 BC - AD 54)

Claudius came from a dysfunctional family, was born with a physical impairment, and grew up somewhat unstable. He overcame his early disadvantages to make a surprisingly successful Emperor, and was arguably one of the most important disabled people in British history.

Tiberius Claudius Drusus was born in Lugdunum (now Lyon), son of a noted Roman military leader and grandson of Mark Anthony. He was the first Roman emperor to be born outside Italy. Sources suggest he was born prematurely: his mother Antonia described him as a “monster of a man, not completed by Dame Nature, but only begun”. His disability has been identified, convincingly to me, as cerebral palsy, although polio and Tourette syndrome have also been suggested. At any rate, his family found him shameful, he was hidden from popular view for much of his youth, and had a guardian even after attaining manhood. In The Problem of Claudius, a dissertation which I first encountered when I was writing my own thesis, Thomas De Coursey Ruth wrote that

“Misunderstood, treated by his own family with cruelty and contempt, constantly made conscious of his imperfections, unable because of his physical weakness and disabilities to assert himself, left a great part of the time to the care of freedmen, or servants, he must have acquired in childhood a feeling of inferiority and of inability to adapt himself to his proper environment.” (1916, 136).

Claudius is described as having problems walking and was therefore carried everywhere in a sedan chair; he had tremor of the hands and head and dribbled; and he had a speech impediment. Initially despising him, his forebear Emperor Augustus later revised his opinion when he heard him giving a formal oration, writing in a letter: “for how anyone who speaks so confusedly in conversation can speak so clearly what he has to say when he declaims I do not see”. He also noted “in matters of importance, when his mind does not get off the subject, the really fine quality of his intellect is apparent”.

Barred from a public career under the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, Claudius retired to a private life of scholarship and over indulgence. A dry and pedantic writer, he produced a number of historical works, and was the last man known to have been able to read Etruscan.

Claudius was the only male member of the royal family to survive the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula, who made him the butt of cruel jokes. Later, Claudius explained that he had pretended to be stupid in order to avoid being assassinated as a potential political rival. After the cruel, probably insane, Caligula was killed by his bodyguard, Claudius was made emperor by the Army, and from henceforth all Roman emperors depended on the army for their power. He took the name Caesar, which now became an official title rather than a surname (Tsar, Kaiser and probably Shah all being later derivations).

But this violent start did not stop Claudius having many successes as emperor. He was an able administrator, reforming the senate and the courts, and building roads, aqueducts and canals, as well as the port of Ostia. He issued up to 20 edicts a day, some of which are evidence of his whimsical and sometimes undignified sense of humour, for example the one on how to cure snake bites and another advocating public flatulence to promote good health. He also wrote a treatise on dice playing.

Liable to make jokes at inappropriate moments, Roman sources claim that Claudius lacked tact and dignity and was too fond of slang. In this, he seems to anticipate Silvio Berlusconi or perhaps Nicholas Sarkozy. Suetonius notes that “in hearing and deciding cases Claudius showed strange inconsistency of temper, for he was now careful and shrewd, sometimes inconsiderate and hasty, and occasionally silly and like a crazy man.” From contemporary accounts, it sounds as if he tended to get over excited, and could be rather naïve in his public pronouncements.

According to the inscription on his triumphal arch, Claudius “was the first to bring barbarian peoples from across the Ocean under the sway of the Roman people”, in other words he led the Roman conquest of Britain in AD43, seizing the capital, Colchester, with the aid of the first elephants to be seen in England.

Claudius was less successful in his private life. Unusual among Roman emperors in being resolutely heterosexual, he was married four times. He was unlucky enough to chose as his third wife the notoriously unfaithful Messalina, and to follow her by marrying his niece Agrippina, who is said to have poisoned him. Timid and trusting, he was vulnerable to the lures of manipulative women as well as to the freedmen who made up his inner circle. Both groups exploited his fears of assassination to get rid of people they did not like.

While Claudius was not vicious like Tiberius or Nero, whom he disastrously chose to succeed him, he did take a morbid delight in witnessing suffering, for example torture, executions and in particular the gladiatorial games. During his reign, 35 senators and 300 knights were executed, although admittedly many of them had conspired against him.

However, Claudius was also generous, loyal and considerate to his friends, and open to people of all classes. Caratacus, the leader of the British resistance to the Romans, was brought to Rome in chains in 51 AD and paraded through the streets. Giving a dignified speech, Caratacus told Claudius that if he was to pardon him, it would be an everlasting memorial to his clemency: which he did, and it was.

To conclude, I find Claudius a complex and interesting character, and not just because he was so successfully ventriloquized by Robert Graves. He was one of the most powerful disabled people in history. His cruelty was typical of ancient Rome, and at least he was not as mad or bad as most other leaders of the time. Intelligent, absent minded and extremely fond of good food and drink, he would probably have fitted in well at an Oxbridge High Table, where he would no doubt have bored his companions with his unsuccessful plan to add three new letters to the Roman alphabet.

Further reading

Robert Graves, I Claudius, Penguin, 1941.

Thomas De Coursey Ruth, The Problem of Claudius: some aspects of a character study, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1916

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)

“We want to rouse the interest of the public: for behind the Cabinet in England always stands the House of Commons & behind the House of Commons always stands the British public. And these are they we want to interest: and these can only be interested by narratives of real lives.”

Although Florence Nightingale is a well-known historical figure, the details of her life are probably familiar to very few. Yet she appears to me not just as one of the most impressive disabled people of the Victorian era, but as one of the most extraordinary women of all time. Known mainly as a benevolent nurse, she deserves recognition as a brilliant health reformer and thinker on public health.

Born in 1820 to a prosperous Derbyshire family, before she could begin the pioneering work to which she believed God had called her, she had first to fight against the prevailing cultural norm that a respectable lady should not have a public career. A woman of her class was expected to devote herself to her family, to frivolous occupations, and to some decorous do-gooding in her local neighbourhood. In particular, nursing was seen as totally unsuitable for a lady, because nurses were considered feckless loose women, who were prone to alcoholism. Florence Nightingale's conflict with her family, in particular with her demanding older sister Parthenope, overshadowed the first half of her life. Moreover, despite being courted by several eligible men - among them Richard Monckton Milnes and Benjamin Jowett, who went on to be Master of Balliol College, Oxford, Nightingale made the active to choice to remain free and single, rather than becoming a submissive wife and mother. Around 1850, she wrote a polemical autobiographical essay about the predicament of middle class Victorian women, Cassandra. When it was finally published in 1928, it was hailed as a proto-feminist classic and inspired both Virginia Woolf and Vera Brittain.

By 1854, having broken free of bourgeois expectations about family loyalty, and with the benefit of a period of training and studying in European hospitals such as Kaiserswerth in Germany, Florence Nightingale was ready to make her contribution to history. The sentimental myth of "The Lady with the Lamp" highlights her work as a nurse in the Crimean war of 1853-1856. Having fought for recognition of the potential benefits of trained female nurses, in 1854 she led a team of forty nurses to care for the injured soldiers in the hospital at Scutari, near Istanbul.

Yet despite the image, Florence Nightingale's talents were to find greatest expression as an administrator, statistician and health reformer, rather than as a carer herself. On her return from the Crimea, shocked by the disastrous logistical inefficiencies and health tragedies she had witnessed, she campaigned tirelessly to improve the medical services available to the British army. She then broadened her interest to other areas of health and social improvement. A convert to the importance of good sanitation, hygiene and ventilation, she first advocated for the improved design of hospitals. Taking advantage of the Nightingale Fund, which had been raised by private subscription after she became an iconic public figure in Britain after her Crimean service, she planned and promoted a training school for nurses at St Thomas' Hospital. Her short book Notes on Nursing outlined her philosophy of nursing and was hugely influential. Later, she turned her attention to the appalling situation of destitute people in British workhouse infirmaries, campaigning for trained nurses to be available for their care. After the great Indian famine of 1877, she became very concerned with promoting health and improving irrigation in the subcontinent, writing in one influential article: "We do not care for the people of India. This is a heavy indictment: but how else account for the facts about to be given? Do we even care enough to know about their daily lives of lingering deaths from causes which we could so well remove?"

As evidenced by her diverse interests and achievements, Florence Nightingale was a highly driven individual. On 7 February 1837, she had received what she believed was a personal calling from God. Her family were Unitarians, but early in life she had rejected organized religion and developed her own eclectic and sophisticated theological approach, combining science and reason with faith. She has been compared to mystics such as Joan of Arc, in the way that she combined contemplation with action. For her, religion was about contributing to the realization of God's law through work.

Alongside her passion, Nightingale enjoyed several other advantages. She had a private income, which enabled her to work independently; her extraordinary public profile allowed her to use the threat of popular opinion to promote her causes; she worked closely with politicians such as Sidney Herbert and with researchers such as John Sutherland and William Farr; and she used her formidable intellect to gather evidence and advocate for reform. In particular, her talent for mathematics saw her at the forefront of the new science of statistics.

Why does Nightingale deserve to be included in a roll-call of distinguished disabled people? Because she has been described as "history's most famous invalid". While in the Crimea, she experienced an acute episode of fever. After her return to England, a gaunt and weary figure, she had recurrent bouts of illness during her lifetime, starting with a collapse in autumn 1857. From 1861, she became bed-bound, for six years. At several points she was believed to be close to death. As a result, she became reclusive, conducting all her research and policy work from her bedroom at the Burlington Hotel, or later from her home at 35, South Street, London. She had always shunned publicity, now she avoided most human contact, relying on endless correspondence to pursue her work: 14,000 of her letters survive. She always worked behind the scenes, and her religious faith led her to shun recognition for her achievements. Not only her physical appearance, but also her personality changed, as she exploited the friends, relatives and allies who supported her work of health reform and endlessly reproached them for their supposed failures and betrayals. She has been accused of malingering, using her illness for her own obsessive ends, and of being a neurotic.

However, recent analysis provides a physical explanation for Nightingale's behaviour (Young, 1995). The fever she contracted in the Crimea has been identified as chronic brucellosis, a disease resulting from a bacterial infection. In the absence of appropriate treatment with antibiotics the condition can persist for years. The symptoms include depression, insomnia, rheumatism, neuralgia and spondylitis, "one of the most incapacitating and painful maladies that can affect man". Poor health combined with a punishing schedule of public health activities meant that frequently Nightingale's friends and allies feared that she was likely to kill herself through overwork. Thankfully, after the age of 60, Nightingale's depression lifted and her personality resumed its previous benevolence, and she was able again to take walks and enjoy visits. She lived on quietly until the age of ninety, although for the last five years of her life she was unaware of her surroundings.

From the start, coverage of Florence Nightingale has veered between the two extremes of "sentimental angel" or "dictatorial reformer". Mark Bostridge's excellent biography (2008) gives a rich and balanced picture of a highly complex and passionate woman, who was intellectually the equal of any man of her time, and who made a major contribution to public health, despite her own debilitating chronic illness.

Further reading

Bostridge M, Florence Nightingale, Penguin, London, 2008.

Young DAB, Florence Nightingale's fever, British Medical Journal 1995, 311: 1697

Outing disabled celebrities: a cautionary note

I love lists. They're just so satisfying. And I'm not alone. In fact, the whole internet is a list-lovers paradise.

I've also noticed an interesting disability list phenomenon, which could be called "Outing Disabled Celebrities". I suspect the idea was borrowed from the gay community. If your identity is ignored at best, stigmatised at worst, then compiling a list of famous and successful people who share your experience can be heartening, even inspirational.

According to Google, there are at least a million lists of famous gay people on the internet, as well as lists of famous Black people, famous vegetarians, famous chess players, famous West Virginians, famous people who were adopted, and hundreds of others. In fairness, there should also be a list of famous dwarfs, but the only one I found has just four members. Four?! That's ridiculous. Even Snow White did better than that.

More enterprising impairment communities have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the game. For example, there are lists of famous people with Asperger's, including Woody Allen, Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain and Vincent Van Gogh. There are lists of famous people with Attention Deficit Disorder, including Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Mozart and Winston Churchill. And of course, there are lists of famous people with depression and mood disorders containing names too numerous to mention.

Now, I can see the benefits of making these sorts of lists to challenge prejudice and negative stereotypes, but the popularity of 'claim a celebrity' does raise a few questions.

For example, just how accurate are these retrospective diagnoses? I'm not the world's greatest scholar, but some of these identifications are pretty dubious. Albert Einstein, for example, had a miserable childhood, started talking late, and was a bit of a nerd. Apparently, these are all potential clues to his neurodiversity, as is the fact that he never learned to drive a car. Yet he also married twice, had many friends, and possessed a good sense of humour. Or take Thomas Jefferson. Here, the evidence seems to consist of the facts that he preferred old clothes, disliked public speaking, felt conflicted about slavery, and kept exceptionally detailed financial records. Well, none of this was particularly unusual at the time, and it hardly adds up to a definitive diagnosis, does it?

Alert readers may have noticed that the same names often crop up on different lists. It's common knowledge that Winston Churchill suffered from depression, which he called his "black dog", but he also gets claimed by the Aspies. Poor old Beethoven and Einstein also seem to have had multiple impairments. And as for Mozart, he's been variously diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder and Asperger's. Perhaps there should be some sort of 'disabled celebrity list summit meeting", which could work to achieve a consensus on exactly which problems afflicted what famous historical figure. Can you imagine the negotiations? "I'll trade you Isaac Newton for Alexander Graham Bell, and I'll throw in a few composers, but you're not having Mark Twain."

Of course, it's only ever the desirable disabled people who get on these lists. Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin might be diagnosed as having manic depression, on the basis of their raging tempers, manic highs, grandiose delusions, paranoia, reckless behaviour, gloomy depression and contemptuous disregard for others. But they don't tend to feature amongst the celebrity numbers.

The whole business of outing celebrities is an attempt to see the positive aspects of conditions that the prejudices of mainstream convention regard as unmitigatingly awful. But there is a risk of going to the other extreme, and glossing over the distressing difficulties of having a mental illness or cognitive impairment. There's also the danger of raising expectations unfairly. High achievers are rare in any field of life. Couldn’t listing dozens of exceptional people with manic depression or Asperger's may even make ordinary people - who have the same conditions but not the same talent - feel worse rather than better? For example, only about 10% of autistic people have savant skills. How many parents of autistic children are doubly disappointed that their child has the severe impairment, but not the compensatory abilities they have seen on the silver screen?

The celebrity disability list seems to be a product of an era in which there are hundreds of different diagnoses, many of them only recently discovered (or maybe 'invented' is a better word). While humans come in all sorts of different varieties and personality types, society is rather intolerant of those who don't fit a narrow norm.

Most traits can be found in the average person. For example, it's common to feel slightly depressed or manic from time to time. My ex-wife was convinced that I'm on the autistic spectrum, because I like to twiddle my fingers in front of my face, and I get upset if plans are changed - not to mention all this list-making. I disagree, because I think the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder fit me much better.

In fact we're both wrong, because there's nothing clinically wrong with me at all. I may occasionally manifest some of the same traits as someone with Asperger's or ADHD, but then so do many people. That's why it's so easy to diagnose long-dead historical figures with different cognitive impairments, and why so many children are being prescribed Ritalin. Almost everyone has their eccentricities, or sometimes feels shy in social gatherings, but that's not the same as autism. Not every nerd is an Aspie.

In a world where people feel uncertain about their identity, many folks jump onto diagnostic bandwagons, wanting to have a label - or a badge - to explain to themselves and to others why they feel different. It makes people feel secure to be officially distinctive and to have a wider community to belong to, and the internet makes it easy. When the original version of this article was published, there were dozens of outraged responses – more than for most of my Ouch contributions – mainly from neurodiverse people furious that I was challenging their role models, and pointing out that conditions like Asperger’s, ADHD and Tourette’s overlap, so it should be no surprise that the same name appears on different lists. My mistake, admittedly, only I don't think it makes any difference to my overall argument.

While I understand the importance of role models - and it's one of the main justifications for this blog - I think labelling, listing and separating can be a dangerous strategy, if taken too far. Rather than concentrating on what divides us, surely we should celebrate what we have in common?Remember Thomas Jefferson not for his eccentricities, but for the powerful (if dated) words which he helped draft: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal".