Diagnosing the illnesses of historical figures is a strange activity. I’m not really sure I approve of picturing the dead in the blue light of a science unknown in their own times, as if they were wearing hospital robes and sitting on examining tables, legs dangling like small children in an adult chair.

But I do know that reading Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder, Claudia Kalb's unpretentious collection of 12 profiles, is a pleasure. In good hands, the goal of embarrassing biographies is literary: to teach compassion with stories of heroes and their tragic flaws. Kalb lives up to her enjoyably grabby title and transcends it. In some 300 pages, roughly divided between biography and medical reporting, she succeeds because of her literary touches and compassionate voice. Moreover, the science is insightful and up-to-the-minute as well.

Kalb, who covered health for many years at Newsweek, supplies a thorough review of​—​spoiler alert!​—​borderline personality disorder (Marilyn Monroe), obsessive compulsive disorder (Howard Hughes), hoarding and intimacy issues (Andy Warhol), eating disorders (Princess Diana), depression (Abraham Lincoln), gender dysphoria (Christine Jorgensen), narcissistic personality disorder (Frank Lloyd Wright), addiction (Betty Ford), anxiety (Charles Darwin), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (George Gershwin), gambling (Fyodor Dostoyevsky), and autism spectrum disorder (Albert Einstein).

The medical details help give us a sense of intimacy with our betters​—​even as we learn how profoundly their quirks isolated them from their contemporaries and actual intimates. Darwin, for example, was so crippled by anxiety it's astonishing he accomplished anything at all: He cried hysterically and complained of "fatigue, dizziness, eczema, boils, muscle weakness, cold fingers and toes, dizziness, black spots," and, most often, abdominal distress. Unable to attend conferences to discuss his own work, the great naturalist hid at home with his wife (in this book, we learn about more than one devoted, and now-unknown, spouse). Visits from his neighbors triggered bouts of shivering and vomiting. Kalb lists nearly 30 proposed diagnoses before she makes her case for anxiety.

This sort of looking backward, though not exactly medicine​—​beyond conferences and journals, medical professionals are not supposed to diagnose illnesses in people they never met​—​seems only as treacherous as other uses of biography. At its best, biography may help us avoid projecting our biases into the past. A contemporary college student might, for example, see nothing more than depression in Milton's famous lament, "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"​—​after all, lots of poets commit suicide, right? It makes a big difference if you know that the poet had gone blind a few years earlier.

How might Einstein have responded to the idea that he was on the "autism spectrum"? A snort or a blank stare? I'm guessing he'd want proof beyond a checklist of symptoms. Darwin, I imagine, would be saddened to hear that we haven't advanced much in treating debilitating anxiety, although we talk continually about our low-grade anxie-ties. As a clinical-level narcissist, Frank Lloyd Wright would have been proud of the label and changed his behavior not at all.

Kalb's chapter on Dostoyevsky and his gambling problem covers the arguments for labeling compulsive behavior an addiction. Many of us still believe, or want to believe, that love, insight, self-discipline​—​perhaps necessarily coupled with imminent disaster​—​are the cure for addiction, even as researchers increasingly establish its biochemical causes, and Dostoyevsky's story illustrates why. The author of The Gambler cured himself.

Dostoyevsky began overspending in his twenties, when he rented a huge apartment that he couldn't furnish and lived largely on bread and milk bought on credit from a grocer. Despite early success, he was already so in debt that he couldn't catch up. At the age of 40, he gambled for the first time, in a German casino where he won the equivalent of $2,000 at roulette. Although roulette is a game of pure chance, Dostoyevsky persuaded himself, as many compulsive gamblers do, that he had a "foolproof betting system."

Ironically, he met his second wife, Anna, with whom he was famously happy, when she came to take dictation for his novel describing how self-deceptive gamblers can be. Yet he continued deluding himself that he had the secret to roulette. Kalb writes: "Despite his ongoing losses (he pawned the couple's wedding rings, his wife's earrings and brooch, his coat, and her shawl), Anna stood by his side. 'One had to come to terms with it,' she later wrote, 'to look at his gambling passion as a disease for which there was no cure.' " Yet somehow, Dostoyevsky emerged from his delusion, after a bout of nightmares, amid fear that he'd lose her. Great love and great insight surely helped. His nine-year gambling spree came to an end, and he lived another decade without a relapse.

Kalb doesn't lean towards psychoanalysis, but she doesn't neglect family history, and her details are telling. At a visit to Wright's famous Falling Water, near Pittsburgh, our tour guides stressed how little he cared about his clients' comfort; no surprise, then, to read that he meets the definition for narcissistic personality disorder. (I'm surprised the docents didn't tell us that his over-involved mother decided that Wright would be an architect​—​before he was born.) I'd read that Abraham Lincoln could be considered depressed, but how sad to learn about a childhood so miserable he stayed away from his father's deathbed and funeral.

Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder reminds us to be grateful for more benign families and the steady advance of medicine. Should you feel that you or your child or spouse can't achieve much because of a mental illness, or can't recover from one, you may take special comfort here. For all of us, medical biographies are a way to revisit the difficult thought that the dead once lived.

Temma Ehrenfeld is a writer in New York.