LORD BYRON’S LAMENESS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18898, 26 June 1923, Page 11

LORD BYRON’S LAMENESS.

CENTURY'S RIDDLE SOLVED. INJURY AT BIRTH. After more than 100 years doctors are still trying to clear up the mystery of the lameness of Lord Byron, and Dr H. C. Cameron believes he has done so. To his lameness Byron was very sensitive; it indeed • poisoned his whole life. The poet tells how once, when 1 he was a child, his mother in one of her fits of fury called him a lame brat, and how he quickly retorted: “I was born so. mother.” Dr Cameron has been discussing the question at the Royal Society of Medicine, and the British Medical Journal reports what he believes is tbs solution of the lameness. During his lifetime it was generally be'ieved that the poet was club-footed, but in which foot, or whether it was in both feet, was never known. His boxing instructor, Gentleman Jackson, the pugilist, thought it was the left. His mother stated definitely in a letter that it was the right foot. WHAT TRELAWNEY SAW. Edward John Trelawney, in his recollections in 1858, describes his visit to where the embalmed body of the poet was lying, watched over by Fletcher, the valet. To get rid of the valet, Trelawney feigned faintness, and asked for a glass of water. When the faithful Fletcher had departed on the errand, Trelawney hurried forward, drew back the black pall and the white shroud r I uncovered the Pilgrim’s feel ami was answered —the groat mystery was solved. Both his feet were clubbed, and the legs withered to the knees—the form and features of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr. But 20 years later-Trelawney republished his book with a striking alteration, .in which this passage said that Byron suffered from contraction of the sinews, causing him to walk on the fore-part of his feet—‘'except this defect his feet were perfect.” “LITTLE’S DISEASE.” Dr Cameron points out that his lameness did not prevent Byron frofn playing cricket for Harrow, and in his famous swim across the Hellespont ho was in the water more than an hour. The lasts on which his boots wore. made, and which were discovered after long search in 1897, were shown to the doctors, and they confirm the belief that the poet did not suffer from club-foot. After careful consideration. Dr Cameron believes Byron suffered from “Little’s disease,” an affection in the lower limbs caused by an injury to the brain at birth, and firsts described by Little* the great, orthopeedio surgeon. Byron was born in the back drawing l room of No. 16, Later No. 24, Holies street, Cavendish square, and the solution of his lameness is to be found in that room, “where 136 years ago the baby Byron first, but too slowly, drew his breath.”