The Psoriatic Revolutionary?

It all ended for Abimael Guzmán, aka Presidente Gonzalo, on September 12, 1992. On that day, the leader of the Shining Path, a guerilla organization that hoped to replace Peru's "bourgeois institutions" with a communist regime, was captured by members of Peru's special forces. At the time of his capture, Guzmán had come out of his jungle hideout to seek treatment for his psoriasis in Lima.

Guzmán isn't the only revolutionary to have suffered from psoriasis, a non-contagious, immune-mediated, genetic disease that appears on the skin and/or in the joints (in the form of psoriatic arthritis, which occurs in approximately 23% of patients). According to DavesPsoriasisInfo, a website devoted to psoriasis, there are other revolutionaries reputed to have suffered from the skin disorder: Robert the Bruce (1274–1329), Jean Paul Marat (1743–1793), and Josef Stalin (1879–1953). This raises the intriguing question: Is there such a thing as the Psoriatic Revolutionary?

Psoriasis

The funny thing about psoriasis is that you don't really "get" it, in the sense of "getting" the flu. Most sufferers, at some point in their lives, simply recognize the symptoms and, following a diagnosis, learn to cope.

The most common type of psoriasis is plaque psoriasis, in which patches of skin, known as lesions, become inflamed and covered by silvery-white scales – the result of skin cells with an abnormal growth cycle. Whereas normal skin cells take about a month to mature and be shed, psoriatic skin cells take three to four days to mature, and instead of falling off, pile on top of one another and form the lesions. The severity and number of lesions depend upon the particular sufferer – some afflicted with the disorder may have only one or two patches on their bodies, while others can have many more. In the most severe cases, sufferers may require hospitalization.

What makes psoriasis really confounding is the difficulty in predicting, tracking, and treating the disease. According to the National Psoriasis Foundation, only one in three people who suffer from psoriasis have a family history of the disease. And psoriasis can be triggered by factors such as trauma to the skin, stress, or certain drugs, even in people without a family history. Treatment ranges from topical creams to systemic treatments, and the effectiveness of a particular treatment often depends upon the individual. Moreover, the disease can go away, only to reappear again years later.

Diseased Geniuses

History is full of artists who have famously suffered while still producing great works of art. Ludwig van Beethoven, for example, endured not only deafness, but bouts of depression on the way to completing his nine symphonies. Vincent van Gogh also dealt with depression throughout his life, but produced many great paintings. And Michelangelo, W.B. Yeats, and Andy Warhol may have all had Asperger syndrome.

Similarly, researchers argue that the self-portraits painted by Albrecht Dürer reveal he had a severe squint, and that those painted by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec expose his deformities. And was there ever any doubt that Edvard Münch, creator of the famous expressionist painting, The Scream, suffered from a mental illness?

To return to psoriasis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Updike suffers from the condition, and has famously connected it to his abilities as a writer. In fact, in his autobiography, Self-Consciousness, Updike has gone so far as to link his "skin's embarrassing overproduction" to his creativity.

Psychology of Psoriasis

Psoriasis is as much a psychological disease as a physical one. Despite its usually hereditary nature, outbreaks of psoriatic lesions can usually be traced to traumatic events in the life of a sufferer. As a result, coping with psoriasis is as much about coping with emotions as it is about dealing with the physical side of the disease. And sometimes it is also about finding an outlet for those emotions.

It's this unpredictable and psychological aspect of psoriasis that triggered Updike's imagination. As he writes in his memoirs, psoriasis was a "constant rude awakening" that set him off from an idealized norm populated by those who didn't have the condition. In Updike's view, "Psoriasis keeps you thinking. Strategies of concealment ramify, and self-examination is endless. You are forced to the mirror again and again; psoriasis compels narcissism, if we suppose a Narcissus who did not like what he saw."

The Psoriatic Revolutionary?

Now suppose Updike's psoriatic Narcissus wasn't generous or benevolent, and confused his own affliction with that of the world around him. Could such a Narcissus become a psoriatic revolutionary? Presuming that there are psoriatic revolutionaries, the unfortunate thing for them is that historical records indicate that having the condition is not a guaranteed route to enduring success for the individuals or their causes. Guzmán, after all, was captured. No matter how well he planned his "strategies of concealment" in the dark, wet jungles of Peru, at some point, he had to come back to Lima for treatment, and there, the authorities waited.

Jean Paul Marat, a hero of the French Revolution, was ultimately no more successful. As depicted in Jacques-Louis David's famous painting, Death of Marat, the disease did him in, too. In Marat's case, a woman who disagreed with his politics stabbed him to death while he was soaking in a medicinal bath to alleviate his psoriasis.

The connection may not be as clear cut, but the disease doesn't seem to have helped Stalin, either. While he did have "success" ruthlessly enforcing his communist ideology, and communism did endure in the Soviet Union for decades, it has now lost its force in the world.

The only psoriatic revolutionary who seems to have been somewhat successful, in the end, was Scottish king Robert the Bruce. Unfortunately, there is some question as to whether or not he actually suffered from psoriasis at all.

The fear of failure, however, has never stopped a committed revolutionary, and in the end, that's a more likely explanation of the revolutionary mindset than a skin disorder like psoriasis.

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