Dickens and his “disorderly” pen

Novelist Charles Dickens’ pen sketches of his characters’ nervous disorders were so accurate they were used in contemporary medical text books and often pre-dated formal medical recognition by decades.

Dicken’s description of the tics, teeth grinding, and grimaces of the character Mr Bell in ‘David Copperfield’ was published more than 40 years before Gilles de la Tourette clinically described the disorder in 1885.

In a paper being published in the ‘Journal of Clinical Neuroscience’ Dr.Kerrie Schoffer of the Austin Hospital in Melbourne says that the famous Victorian novelist’s observations had helped develop modern understanding of neurological disorders.

In ‘The Pickwick Papers’ Dickens linked Parkinson’s Disease and dementia in an old man whose “limbs were shaking with disease and the palsy had fastened on his mind”. In ‘David Copperfield’ a sleepwalker had the disorder known as restless legs syndrome where he had “the fidgets in his legs and was twisting them and hitting them and putting them through all kinds of contortions in his small pantry”.

Although Charles Dickens did not have any clinical training Dr Schoffer said he had social contact with prominent physicians and the opportunity to observe people with movement disorders. “If there’s one thing that doctors and writers have in common it is that we both have to observe people very closely, and I think that Dickens’s work is a great model for the interaction between medicine and literature”.