Edward Gibbon: The Historian Who Hid His Illness for 32 Years

London, November 1793. Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, writes a "most private" letter to his friend Lord Sheffield: "I must at length withdraw the veil". Since 1761, when he was a militia captain, he had had a swelling in the scrotum. He consulted a surgeon, who asked to see him again; as it did not hurt, he never went back. He told no one for thirty-two years and forbade his valet to mention it, although his friends could see it. By 1793 it was, in his own words, "almost as big as a small child". The surgeons called it a hydrocele, "a collection of water", and tapped it three times: four quarts of fluid came out, three more ten days later and six in January 1794. He joked through the operation and went on dining out every day. On 15 January he said he thought himself good for ten, twelve or perhaps twenty years. He died the next day, aged 56.

What do we know for certain? What he wrote himself and what Lord Sheffield recorded when he published Gibbon's letters and an account of his last months in 1796. The phrases in quotation marks are Gibbon's own. The examination after his death found, besides the hydrocele, an old rupture: much of the colon and the omentum lay inside the sac, and the testicle was healthy. He and his surgeons spoke of a hydrocele; Sheffield had always suspected a rupture; both were there. We do not know exactly what he died of, and the video does not say. Nor can anyone know whether going back to the surgeon would have saved him. The Spanish version speaks of litres as an approximation: the sources give quarts.

Today a hydrocele or an inguinal hernia is treated with a planned operation, usually as a day case or with a short stay. What has not changed is what held Gibbon back: embarrassment. A lump in the scrotum or the groin deserves a consultation even if it does not hurt.