Romanticising illnesses
(Nice peeve, good peeve.)
I have oft (it seems to me) complained about the tendency to associate certain illnesses with creativity, or at least romanticise them. Particularly the idea of the syphilitic genius - these two elements are independent of one another, not connected: we might also remark the same thing about tuberculosis.
Most people with consumption were not poets, or if they did write poetry, we are probably talking school of William the Bloody Awful Poet.
Other complaints which have associations which are probably entirely misleading:
Migraine - the ailment of the highly intelligent? Flattering, but probably not true. Just because a lot of intelligent people suffer/ed from it, and wrote about their sufferings, doesn't mean that they were the only ones.
Gout - not actually an aristocratic disease of high living. Anything that afflicts 1 in 100 people of the UK population is pretty certainly affecting individuals who are not members of the Upper Ten Thousand (even if the incidence is believed to have increased of recent decades).
And let's just not go into the even more problematic world of assorted forms of mental illness.
There are doubtless other ailments about which there are generally very misleading ideas.
I can see that it makes a good story to say 'I suffer from X because I am Such a Speshul Person, it is the Price I Pay for Mi Giftz' or that 'I may have [nasty life-threatening disease] but it makes me Wonderfully Creative'. Unfortunately, these things are All More Complicated. Sometimes things are actually not connected.
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