Did Suetonius really call gout morbus dominorum? A philological and historico‑medical reconstruction.

Current scientific literature often defines gout as morbus dominorum, in agreement with the Greek-Roman representation of podagra (ποδάγρα, literally “foot-trap”) as a consequence of gluttony and libertinage. Several authors place the origins of this expression with the Roman writer Suetonius, without however quoting any specific primary source. We have investigated this problem again and scrutinized primary sources ranging from the Roman World to the early Middle Ages. A search on the database of Latin texts for the expression morb* domin* failed to identify any positive correspondence, not only in Suetonius’ works but also in those of other Latin authors. As a matter of fact, the expression morbus dominorum appeared for the first time in the literature on podagra in 1661 in Jakob Balde’s book Solatium Podagricorum. Since then, this definition has been endlessly repeated in seventeenth- to eighteenth-century literature on gout. In 1866, while lecturing on the diseases of the elderly, ...