Famously Sick
Dworkin, Ronald W.
Famously Sick Disease in the news, and the people who suffer. by Ronald W. Dworkin Today's celebrity culture shares much with the pagan culture of antiquity. In Rome, the daily doings of the gods...
...The gods and goddesses commanded respect, but they were also high entertainment value...
...Like the immortals of yesteryear, today's celebrities endure the same conflicting tales, even bald-faced lies, told about them, which the public eats up...
...Thus, in celebrity culture, both Julia Roberts and Bill Gates can be celebrities...
...The one glaring difference between Ronald W. Dworkin, M.D., a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author of Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class...
...Lerner has written a good book, and one that probably comes close to the limits of what can be accomplished, given the subject matter...
...Then again, Lerner can be credited with not making a mountain out of a molehill...
...As a kind of hybrid between serious sociology and first-class gossip, it would be perfect for summer reading on the beach...
...Even the worldview of the crank would have been better than nothing...
...Still, from an entertainment perspective, all this means is that the great mass of people have one more thing to gossip about to pass the time and enliven their humdrum lives...
...Celebrity medicine is just one more expression of the popular desire to hear more...
...Indeed, it is as much a product of celebrity culture as the celebrities themselves...
...We have gone quickly from a time when death from diseases like leukemia and other cancers was certain to a time when death from such diseases is no sure thing, thus making possible the heroic struggle, with a chance for victory as well as defeat, the source of all great drama, even drama in celebrity culture...
...Reading the book, I didn't see how Lou Gehrig's struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in the 1930s stood at an earlier stage in the evolution of celebrity culture than Rita Hay-worth's struggle with Alzheimer's Disease in the 1970s, at least not in the way that most historians define cultural change...
...The experience in celebrity culture is eerily similar...
...Barron Lerner, a physician and professor of medicine and public health at Columbia, has given us a detailed account of what some of these modern-day gods and goddesses have endured in their fight for life...
...Lerner is, above all, a teller of tales, and he examines the lives of 12 famous people and shows how their respective struggles with disease resonated with the American people...
...Celebrity books that once covered crumbling marriages, illicit sex, and bankruptcy proceedings now reserve extra space for diseases...
...The fact that celebrities now have stories of struggle with an open-ended story line (some of the celebrities here actually survive) may simply be a testament to the enormous medical progress made during the last century...
...there is no real narrative...
...The synthesis and analysis part of the book, the intellectual heavy lifting, could probably have fit into a single essay...
...Both figures were simply famous people who fell ill and were talked about...
...Although this is very entertaining, and in terms of writing style and investigative research Lerner's methods far surpass standard tabloid fare, it is not particularly illuminating...
...But the tie between the chapters is artificial...
...Had Dr...
...Conflicting tales were told about these immortal beings—did the goddess Diana turn Actaeon into a stag to be hunted down by his own dogs because he saw her naked or because he mocked her hunting skills?—but that was the price they paid for being well known...
...In Rome, the daily doings of the gods and goddesses, their tiffs, their spats and trials, were the talk of the town...
...Still, the reader picks up some interesting facts...
...Did you know that Rita Hayworth once slapped a stewardess on a flight to London...
...It titillates, but little more...
...Did you know that when John Foster Dulles was dealing with the Suez crisis, the effects of which reverberate to this day, he was suffering with shaking chills and abdominal pain, which eventually led doctors to his diagnosis of colon cancer...
...today's celebrity culture and the old pagan belief system is that the luminaries of old were immortal...
...Did you know that when Lou Gehrig gave his farewell speech in 1939, thousands of seats in Yankee Stadium were empty, as many people thought Gehrig was announcing only a leave of absence from which he would eventually return...
...Lerner makes some thoughtful comments about celebrity sickness in a democratic culture, but most of his observations are derivative: for example, the notion that the celebrity disease culture has further democratized the subject of illness (as if anything in our society was left to be democratized...
...Magic might have caused them to be turned into cows, echoes, or trees, but they usually landed back on their feet when the spells wore off, and they certainly didn't get sick and die...
...Actors, politicians, and computer nerds ascend to celebrity status only to find that the most mundane aspects of their lives have become a source of public titillation...
...Specifically, Lerner devotes each chapter to the trial of one suffering celebrity, with the last paragraph in each foretelling the looming crisis for the next celebrity...
...Reading Lerner, I almost longed for some good old-fashioned vulgar Marxism: the idea, for example, that advertising agencies are in cahoots with the medical profession, and that celebrity gossip is used to deform class consciousness and distract workers (big buyers of tabloids) from attacking capitalists...
...It is their well-known-ness that captured people's attention and made people want to talk about them...
...Today's obsession with celebrity illness is probably nothing more than a reflection of people's deepest fears about disease and death...
...But all of them are (or at least were) well known—the sine qua non of celebrity status...
...Certainly the ways to achieve celebrity status recall ancient days, when beauty worked as a ticket, in the case of Venus, but so did skill as a blacksmith: the god Vulcan, for example, being ugly and lame—kind of a nerd—but mighty talented with an anvil and hammer...
...Lerner lived in ancient days, his work would have most resembled that of Hesiod or Pausinias, writers who recorded the life experiences of the gods and goddesses in minute detail...
...What the book lacks is a strong thesis, putting the matter of celebrity patienthood in some kind of sociological perspective...
...In our celebrity culture, celebrities do get sick and die...
...A few of them are famous for no other reason than that they were guinea pigs for doctors' inventions: Barney Clark, for example, the first person to receive an artificial heart...
...To the extent that an evolution has occurred—for example, people's growing appetite for gossip about celebrities—one gets a sense that the celebrity medical experience is not determinant in any way and that it parallels the larger cultural trend...
...Some of the celebrities are actors, a few are athletes, and one is a politician...
Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 4
