FREDERICK HOLMES. The Sickly Stuarts: The Medical Downfall of a Dynasty. Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2003. xvi, 224 pp. 20.

Abstract

This book aims to show “exactly how disease and disability brought down the Stuart dynasty” (12). It has its origins in the intellectual curiosity and fascination with the Stuart dynasty of a Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center, Frederick Holmes. Professor Holmes turned his curiosity to good effect by undertaking formal academic study in history in the 1990s, culminating in a master’s degree in 1998. One offshoot of these labors was his realization that he could see and evaluate medical data in primary and secondary source material better than most historians. This, indeed, is the case, but his belief that it was poor health and medical misadventures that brought down the Stuart monarchy is much less securely based. While his detailed exploration of medical data, including that which can be culled from post-mortem examinations, renders accessible to the political historian much that would otherwise remain obscure or arcane, Professor Holmes puts an explanatory weight upon this evidence that it simply cannot bear. Few historians, for example, would be happy with the statement that “[t]he rise of parliamentary power in England during the seventeenth century was made possible by the progressive weakening of the House of Stuart by disease and disability” (3), or with the assertion that “[t]he power of the Stuarts and the English monarchy slowly faded throughout the long seventeenth century as the Stuarts were brought down by a series of medical problems and Parliament simultaneously increased in power to fill the void” (2).