Did Will Shakespeare's doctors addle his brain with cinnabar and mercury? Was Jane Eyre inspired by the plagued school that claimed the Bronte clan? Did writing 1984 kill George Orwell? Dr John Ross of Harvard Medical School opems his surgery to consult with the likes of Milton, Swift, Melville, Joyce and Jack London, exploring the history of medicine as never before, from the Bard's cloaked visits to Southwark to cure his unsavoury rashes to the arsenic-and-horse-serum jabs given for Yeats's fevers. With novelistic flair and deep expertise, Ross reveals a wholly absorbing new view on the writer's life.