FRIDAY, Nov. 4, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- Well-known British author George Orwell was hardly Mr. Sunshine, given the grim worlds he created in his books, especially the foreboding novel "1984." So why all the gloom?
In a new study, an infectious-disease specialist suggests that a bad case of tuberculosis may be partially responsible, along with the drastic treatments Orwell underwent toward the end of his life.
Orwell was "always a gloomy, pessimistic sort," said study co-author Dr. John J. Ross of Caritas Saint Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston. But by the time Orwell wrote his masterpiece in the late 1940s, he was very sick and even more out of sorts, Ross added.
" '1984' would have certainly been a very different book, and maybe a less powerful book, had he not been so desperately ill at the time," Ross contended.
Ross has already made a name for himself in the field of diagnosing historical figures. Earlier this year, he wrote a controversial study suggesting that evidence in the life and writings of William Shakespeare showed the playwright probably suffered from syphilis.
In the new study, published in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Clinical
Infectious Diseases, Ross looks at Orwell, who lived from 1903 to 1950. Orwell published his political allegory "Animal Farm" in 1945, four years before "1984," his depiction of a totalitarian government that turns language into a weapon against its own people. Today, the book is perhaps best known for its invention of the concepts of "doublethink" and "Big Brother."
Orwell -- whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair -- always had respiratory problems, and appears to have developed tuberculosis while living in Burma and in the cities that provided the subject matter for his book about underground life called "Down and Out in Paris and London."
In the 19th and early 20th century, tuberculosis -- also known as consumption -- often struck artists and authors who lived in crowded, germ-filled slums. In many cases, infected people slowly wasted away, giving the victims a romantic cast, as seen in the film "Moulin Rouge."
Antibiotics weren't available until near mid-20th century, so treatments involved bed rest or the dangerous "collapse therapy," in which doctors actually collapsed the lungs of patients to stop oxygen from feeding tuberculosis infections, Ross said.
Orwell underwent just such a treatment in the late 1940s. Around the same time, "his writing acquired a great deal of urgency," Ross said.
Why? It was partly because he had returned from the Spanish Civil War and was appalled by the "lies, deceit and murder he'd seen," Ross said. But he also thinks Orwell's illness instilled "a sense of his own mortality," even if he tried to deny how sick he was.
Overall, Ross said, Orwell's illness may have played a major role in his writing because it forced him to lie in bed. "You probably spend more time in your head than other people, more time to be creative and think," Ross said. "It makes you rely on your own resources, and it gives you time away from the world to formulate your creativity."
Peter Stansky, a British history professor at Stanford University who has studied Orwell, said the author appears to have ignored his bad health.
"I think he was pretty much a wreck, but he just went on," Stansky said. "There was a Puritanism and asceticism about him and also the English tendency to regard taking too much care of yourself as too self-indulgent."
But did Orwell's illness turn him into one of history's most powerful and influential writers? "I don't think his bad health drove his vision," Stansky said. "But it might have been a small factor."
Orwell died in 1950, before antibiotics began to make tuberculosis a much more treatable -- if often still deadly -- disease.
More information
Learn more about tuberculosis at the National Institutes of Health.
