The presence of some of the people on that list of famous sufferers strikes me as downright alarming. You could possibly paint a fresco or write a satire while enduring a gout attack, but running a country or conducting a war is a very different and very scary matter. Persistent gout can lead to a profoundly uncharitable attitude toward your fellow man. The line “Exterminate all the brutes!” was written by that famous gout sufferer Joseph Conrad.

Conrad, according to the biographies, picked up something called “malarial gout” while in the Belgian Congo, some years before he wrote “Heart of Darkness.” It lodged in his hands as well as his feet, including the wrist of his writing hand, which must have been a particular torture.

Conrad’s fiction makes no mention of gout. I confess I haven’t read every word of every Conrad novel, but this information comes from the magisterial volume “Gout: The Patrician Malady,” by Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, and that’s good enough for me. Conrad saved the topic for his letters, where he regularly unburdened himself. In a 1905 letter to Sir Sidney Colvin, he wrote, “There comes a point when disease like bad weather at sea becomes in sailor parlance, unmanageable; there were four days when I had to lie on my back as helpless as a waterlogged and dismasted hulk.” The notion that his vision of “The horror! The horror!” might be a personal response to gout pain is certainly reductive, but far from inconceivable.

Perhaps Conrad avoided mentioning gout in his novels because it’s so frequently seen as a comic plot device. The fictional gout sufferer has historically been, and continues to be, a figure of fun rather than tragedy. Falstaff rails against it in “Henry IV, Part 2”: “A pox of this gout!” he says. Sir Leicester Dedlock in Dickens’s “Bleak House” is a laughable old aristo who regards gout as a painful but necessary, indeed a noble, part of his family inheritance. Gout pops up throughout P. G. Wodehouse as a nasty and disabling condition, but not something to be taken at all seriously. More recently, in an episode of the animated sitcom “King of the Hill,” young Bobby develops gout after becoming addicted to chicken liver sandwiches. The gout-afflicted in fiction invariably fail to see the funny side of their ailment. Laughter, we can safely say, is not the best medicine.

The nearest I can come to a tragic, fictional association with gout is in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” where Tertius Lydgate, a doctor who once had ambitions to make great scientific discoveries, ends up trapped in an unhappy marriage, treating the gout of rich old men and even writing a treatise on the subject. The implication is that it’s humiliating enough to suffer from gout, but it’s much more humiliating to treat it in others  more yet to write about it.

I’m not claiming a tragic destiny for myself any more than I’m suggesting that gout is proof of my genius. Rather, I’m hoping that one day soon gout will become more accepted and maybe even fashionable, like attention deficit disorder or sex addiction.

No doubt it would help if some contemporary, irredeemably hip young writer were to come out of the gout closet. The problem is that literary hipness is such a fragile flower that it’s hard to imagine anyone whose reputation could withstand such a revelation.

Perhaps it’s time for a literateuse to hobble up to the plate. Gout is rare in women, but far from unknown, and studies show it’s on the increase. One explanation is that more women are now keeping up with the guys, eating red meat and boozing to excess. (And I can encounter these women where?) Perhaps in the near future some cool young women writers will fess up to gout, and we can look forward to such titles as “A Gout of One’s Own,” “Gout and Prejudice,” “Gout and the City” and the one I think just can’t miss, “Gouty Bitch.”