A right royal spat

A right royal rumpus

People in more mature democracies may wonder why the British media disseminate so feverishly the opinions of someone described as ‘His Royal Highness’. Puzzlement was doubly justified recently when The Daily Telegraph published an article — flagged by other newspapers with headlines such as “Charles warns against genetic foods” — which it then largely demolished in an editorial. Prince Charles ...

A right Royal porphyria fallacy.

We were intrigued by the cover image for the November 2011 issue of Clinical Chemistry, which showed a cover picture claiming that Mary Queen of Scots had a diagnosis of acute porphyria. The diagnosis of porphyria is usually assigned when a presenting patient is currently symptomatic; the range of indicative symptoms is diverse but relatively well defined. The 3 most common acute porphyrias are...

Porphyria—a Royal Malady*

FARMFR GEORGE was a mad king, and so we lost the American colonies: such in brief is the recollection of what the man-in-the-street garnered at school. It is remarkable that so little attention has been paid to the nature of George III's malady, and it is a sad reflection on British medical historians that during the 200 years that have elapsed since his first overt attack of illness, there hav...

A royal medicine chest.

Tim MUSEUM in the little town of Arendal in southern Norway possesses a fine English medicine chestwhich belonged to Queen Caroline Mathilde of Denmark. On 8 November 1766 this posthumous daughter of George II's eldest son, Frederick, married King Christian VII of Denmark and Norway. Caroline Mathilde was fifteen years old, and Christian VII two years her senior. He had succeeded to the Danish ...

Porphyria - a Royal Malady