Fun times with gout, a condition that I have developed this year (due to my kidney failure from Alport Syndrome).  Image by James Gillray - The Gout by James Gillray. Published May 14th 1799. Via copy at [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3796712

I am grateful to be able to live now, where I have medicines like colchicine and allopurinol to treat the age-old affliction of gout.

I think in the past I would have had to resort to various plasters, as evidenced by the medical ads in historical newspapers:

"The Patent Medicated India Rubber Porous Plaster," advertisement, Tarboro' press (Tarboro, Edgecombe, NC) April 29, 1848, page 3, col 3; digital image, Library of Congress (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042204/1848-04-29/ed-1/seq-3/ : accessed 9 March 2017).

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