Henry VIII's Health in a Nutshell by Kyra Cornelius Kramer

Introduction
    Henry VIII is one of England’s most well-known monarchs. Although he should be more justly famous for breaking England away from the Catholic church and creating the rough draft of the Church of England, it is the fact that he notoriously married six women and executed two of them during his desperate quest for a male heir that makes him stick in the public mind. Henry’s popularity had led to many depictions of him in visual media and written fiction, showing him as everything from an uncouth, fat tyrant eating a turkey leg to a sexy and sex-crazed hound. Notwithstanding the imagined versions of him, Henry was more than an obese, reproductively challenged, marriage monger. In reality, the youthful king was athletic, intelligent and kind. It was only after his marriages and attempts at securing a male heir had gone spectacularly awry and his health had likewise failed that Henry turned into a monster.

Figure 1 - Henry VIII from a vintage engraving from 1855
    The oddities of Henry’s reign have inspired many people, laymen and historians alike, to postulate medical explanations for his reproductive tribulations and his disintegrating health, both physically and mentally. Some theories try to explain why the king developed ulcers on his upper legs and became nearly immobile in his middle age. Other theories try to understand why the king who was once noted for his scholarship and chivalry became “a psychotic, paranoid bully” in his middle age 1 . A few theories try to formulate an answer for why Henry’s reproductive track record is marred by foetal loss and neonatal deaths, and even fewer serve as an umbrella explanation for all the king’s problems. His suspected ailments are legion, and harder to fit into a nutshell that one would expect.
    One of the compounding factors about Henry’s health is comorbidity. Any patient can have multiple illnesses at the same time, and the king was no exception. Considering the constellation of symptoms that hounded Henry, it is almost certain that he had more than a single ailment or underlying health issue. These myriad problems often overlap so that it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends without modern diagnostic tools. Lacking his DNA for analysis, all that scholars can offer is educated guesses and reasonable hypothesizes based on clues winkled out of historical record.

Conclusion
    Considerable challenges face historians in their attempts to ascertain the truth. Piecing together the facts from the bits of information that survived for centuries is very difficult. Often information is gleaned from letters written about court gossip and that relay only second-hand knowledge. Additionally, the writers of those letters were not impartial. The court teemed with intrigue and factional jockeying for power. Those who were in the favour of certain ministers, or wives, of the king could view the same event very differently. It is even more difficult to make an accurate medical diagnosis using information gleaned from those same slanted historical records. While there are genetic markers for the suspected conditions and new techniques for extracting DNA from very old remains, so that if Henry’s body were exhumed for analysis a DNA test could prove or disprove beyond doubt many of the medical theories about the king, the funds to dig Henry up are simply not available – even if the current queen would give researchers permission to do so. Until such analysis is allowed, historical clues will have to suffice in the search for answers regarding Henry’s health and ambiguous reign.

Bibliography
    Ackroyd, Peter. 2013. Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I. Macmillan.
    Adamson, Melitta Weiss. 2004. Food in Medieval Times. Greenwood Publishing Group.
    Baichoo, V. and Bruce-Tagoe, A. 2000 “Recurrent hydrops fetalis due to Kell allo-immunization” Annals of Saudi Medicine Sep-Nov; 20(5-6):415-6.
    Berkowitz RL, Beyth Y, Sadovsky