Heredity: Royal Malady

When Britain's King George III died in 1820, he was blind, deaf and apparently mad. His physicians, limited in their medical knowledge and hindered by protocol in examining their royal patient (they could not inquire how he felt unless he spoke to them first), had long since concluded that the King was "under an entire alienation of mind." George III went down in history as the mad monarch, a judgment accepted by generations of historians and buttressed by psychiatric studies.

Now, however, two British psychiatrists who re-examined George's medical records in the light of new medical knowledge are proposing a...

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