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Benjamin Franklin's medical history shows that he suffered from repeated attacks of gout and a large bladder stone. These conditions caused him considerable pain, markedly decreased his mobility, and likely contributed in indirect ways to his decline and eventual death from a pulmonary disorder. This article examines Franklin's risk factors for gout and stones, both as Franklin understood them and as we know them today. Significantly, both of these disorders are associated with high blood levels of uric acid, a metabolic by-product. Franklin's risk factors included his gender, genetics, diet, drinking, advanced age, psoriasis, and exposure to lead. Although it is impossible to assign a weight to each of these factors, it can be shown that a number of factors, each capable of raising uric acid levels, converged and conspired against him.
FOUR DAYS after Benjamin Franklin died on 17 April 1790, his at- tending physician, Dr. John Jones, provided the Pennsylvania Ga- zette, the newspaper Franklin once owned, with a brief account of his last illness.3 Readers were informed that "[a]bout sixteen days be- fore his death, he was seized with a feverish indisposition, without any particular symptoms attending it till the third or fourth day, when he complained of a pain in his left breast, which increased till it became extremely acute, attended with a cough and laborious breathing." Franklin had "no doubt his present afflictions were kindly intended to wean him from a world, in which he was no longer fit to act the part assigned to him."
The summary of Franklin's final moments continued:
In this frame of body and mind he continued till five days before his death, when his pain and difficulty breathing entirely left him, and his family were flattering themselves with the hopes of a recovery, when an imposthumation [abscess], which had formed itself in his lungs, suddenly burst, and discharged a great quantity of matter, which he continued to throw up while he had sufficient strength to do it, but, as that failed, the organs of respiration became gradually oppressed - a calm lethargic state succeeded - and on the 17th instant, about 11 o'clock at night, he quietly expired, closing a long and useful life of eighty-four years and three months.
Jones then...