Wealth & Money Quote by Thomas Sydenham

Sydenham weaponizes humility as a scalpel. By calling himself “humble” and then savoring a “poor comfort,” he performs the bedside manner of a scientist who knows exactly how ugly envy can sound when stated plainly. The joke lands because it’s only half a joke: gout really was, in his era, a badge of surplus - a disease fed by meat, wine, and leisure, the metabolic price of privilege. He pretends to be consoled by the rich man’s suffering, but the consolation is petty on purpose. That pettiness is the point.

The line also slips in a sharper provocation: “more wise men than simple.” Sydenham isn’t praising stupidity; he’s puncturing the period’s faith that intellect and refinement confer a kind of moral or bodily immunity. Gout becomes a corrective to the Renaissance fantasy that education elevates you out of nature. In this framing, the body is the great leveler, but not by distributing pain equally - by targeting the very classes that imagine themselves exempt.

Context matters: as a physician associated with careful clinical observation, Sydenham is staking a claim for medicine that looks at patterns, lifestyles, and populations, not just divine punishment or vague humors. He’s reading illness as social data. The comfort he offers the “poor” is bitter, not liberating: disease still humiliates everyone, it just humiliates some people with better linens.