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Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was a famous author. He is widely believed to have suffered from OCD. Johnson's friend and biographer, James Boswell, described his compulsive behaviors in the biography Life of Johnson.
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A man named Mr. Whyte described watching Johnson walk down the street and repeatedly touch posts.
I perceived him at a good distance working along with a peculiar solemnity of deportment, and an awkward sort of measured step.... Upon every post as he passed along, I could observe he deliberately laid his hand; but missing one of them, when he had got at some distance, he seemed suddenly to recollect himself, and immediately returning back, carefully performed the accustomed ceremony, and resuming his former course, not omitting one till he gained the crossing. This, Mr. Sheridan assured me ... was his constant practice.
[From James Boswell, Life of Johnson, as quoted in Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr., Samuel Johnson's Tics and Gesticulations, Journal of the History of Medicine, April 1967, 22: 152-168.]
A woman named Francis Reynolds described Johnson's ritual while passing through doorways.
Nor has anyone, I believe, described his extraordinary gestures or antics with his hands and feet, particularly when passing over the threshold of a Door, or rather before he would venture to pass through any doorway. On entering Sir Joshua's house with poor Mrs Williams, a blind lady who lived with him, he would quit her hand, or else whirl her about on the steps as he whirled and twisted about to perform his gesticulations; and as soon as he had finish'd, he would give a sudden spring and make such an extensive stride over the threshold, as if he were trying for a wager how far he could stride, Mrs Williams standing groping about outside the door unless the servant or the mistress of the house more commonly took hold of her hand to conduct her in, leaving Dr Johnson to perform at the Parlor Door much the same exercise over again.
...But the manoeuvre that used the most particularly to engage the attention of the company was his stretching out his arm with a full cup of tea in his hand, in every direction, often to the great annoyance of the person who sat next to him, indeed to the imminent danger of their clothes, perhaps of a Lady's Court dress; sometimes he would twist himself round with his face close to the back of his chair, and finish his cup of tea, breathing very hard, as if making a laborious effort to accomplish it.
[From G.B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies (NY: Barnes & Noble, 1897), vol. 2, p. 297, as quoted in T.J. Murry, Dr. Samuel Johnson's movement disorder, British Medical Journal, 1979, 1:1610-14.]
In Life of Johnson, James Boswell described some of Johnson's peculiarities.
About this time...[h]e was so ill, as, notwithstanding his remarkable love of company, to be entirely averse to society.... Dr. Adams told me, that, as an old friend, he was admitted to visit him, and that he found him in a deplorable state, sighing, groaning, talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room to room. He then used this emphatical expression of the misery which he felt: 'I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my spirits.'
Talking to himself was, indeed, one of his singularities ever since I knew him. I was certain that he was frequently uttering pious ejaculations; for fragments of the Lord's Prayer have been distinctly overhead....
He had another particularity, of which none of his friends ever ventured to ask an explanation. It appeared to me some superstitious habit, which he had contracted early, and from which he had never called upon his reason to disentangle him. This was his anxious care to go out or in at a door or passage, by a certain number of steps from a certain point, or at least so as that either his right or left foot, (I am not certain which,) should constantly make the first actual movement when he came close to the door or passage. Thus I conjecture: for I have, upon innumerable occasions, observed him suddenly stop, and then seem to count his steps with a deep earnestness; and when he had neglected or gone wrong in this sort of magical movement, I have seen him go back again, put himself in a proper posture to begin the ceremony, and, having gone through it, break from his abstraction, walk briskly on, and join his companion.
[From James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by R.W. Chapman (Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 342-3.]
Johnson is also widely believed to have suffered from Tourette Syndrome.
In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly under his breath, too, too, too: all this accompanied sometimes with a thoughtful look, but more frequently with a smile.
[From James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by R.W. Chapman (Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 343.]
The following excerpt is from Johnson's short novel, Rasselas. Boswell noted that Johnson had referred to his own mental condition "in one of the chapters of his Rasselas."
No disease of the imagination...is so difficult of cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other. If fancy presents images not moral or religious, the mind drives them away when they give it pain, but when melancholick notions take the form of duty, they lay hold on the faculties without opposition, because we are afraid to exclude or banish them.
[From Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, chap. 46.]
We put up at the Angel inn [Boswell wrote] and passed the evening by ourselves in easy and familiar conversation. Talking of constitutional melancholy, he [Johnson] observed, 'A man so afflicted, Sir, must divert distressing thoughts, and not combat with them.' BOSWELL. 'May not he think them down, Sir?' JOHNSON. 'No, Sir. To attempt to think them down is madness. He should have a lamp constantly burning in his bed-chamber during the night, and if wakefully disturbed, take a book, and read, and compose himself to rest. To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.' BOSWELL. 'Should not he provide amusements for himself? Would it not, for instance, be right for him to take a course of chymistry?' JOHNSON. 'Let him take a course of chymistry, or a course of rope-dancing, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.'
[From James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by R.W. Chapman (Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 690.]
Johnson wrote a prayer called "Against Inquisitive and Perplexing Thoughts."
O Lord, my Maker and Protector, who hast graciously sent me into this world to work out my salvation, enable me to drive from me all such unquiet and perplexing thoughts as may mislead or hinder me in the practice of those duties which Thou hast required. When I behold the works of thy hands, and consider the course of thy providence, give me grace always to remember that thy thoughts are not my thoughts, nor thy ways my ways. And while it shall please Thee to continue me in this world, where much is to be done, and little to be known, teach me by thy Holy Spirit, to withdraw my mind from unprofitable and dangerous inquiries, from difficulties vainly curious, and doubts impossible to be solved. Let me rejoice in the light which Thou hast imparted, let me serve Thee with active zeal and humble confidence, and wait with patient expectation for the time in which the soul, which Thou receivest shall be satisfied with knowledge. Grant this, O Lord, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.
[From James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by R.W. Chapman (Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 1354.]
Boswell related the following conversation between Johnson and a child.
Miss Hunter, a niece of his friend, Christopher Smart, when a very young girl, struck by his extraordinary motions said to him, "Pray Dr. Johnson, why do you make such strange gestures?" "From a bad habit, (he replied.) Do you, my dear, take care to guard against bad habits."
[From James Boswell, Life of Johnson, as quoted in Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr., Samuel Johnson's Tics and Gesticulations, Journal of the History of Medicine, April 1967, 22: 152-168.]
Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr., Samuel Johnson's Tics and Gesticulations, Journal of the History of Medicine, April 1967, 22:152-168.
Christopher Morrant, The melancholy of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Jan. 15, 1987, 136:201-3.
T. J. Murry, Dr. Samuel Johnson's movement disorder, British Medical Journal, 1979, 1:1610-14.
William B. Ober, Johnson and Boswell: "Vile Melancholy" and "The Hypochondriack," Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, Sept. 1985, 61:657-678.
Roy Porter, "The Hunger of Imagination: approaching Samuel Johnson's melancholy," in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, W.F. Bynum et al., eds. (London: Tavistock Pubs., 1985), 63-88.
George Rousseau, Splitters and lumpers: Samuel Johnson's tics, gesticulations and reverie revisited, History of Psychiatry, 2009, 20.1: 72-86.
There are also several full-length biographies of Samuel Johnson, including Peter Martin, Samuel Johnson: A Biography (Belknap Press, 2008) and Jeffrey Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (Basic Books, 2008). Both of these were timed to coincide with the tercentenary (300th anniversary) of Johnson's birth.
