3, 6 It was certainly of concern and after his recovery there were extensive discussions on a potential regent as at that time his heir (the future George IV) was only three years old. Unfortunately medical details are not available for the 1765 episode: Macalpine and Hunter claimed that the illness was a porphyric chest infection, others have indicated that the King had some mental health problems. However, recent studies by the author and colleagues have provided evidence seriously contesting Macalpine and Hunter's claim 4 and indicated, as previously reported, 5– 7 that the King suffered four/possibly five episodes of bipolar disorder. Although the two papers generated considerable correspondence, much of it critical, their reprinting with supporting statements by John Brooke and Abe Goldberg, leading Georgian historian and a porphyria expert respectively, as a glossy booklet titled Porphyria: a royal malady, seemed to set the seal on the claim and this view is generally accepted, especially by historians and the general public. 3 In these publications they categorically stated that the King suffered from recurrent attacks of acute intermittent porphyria, subsequently changed to the rarer and milder condition variegate porphyria. In the mid-1960s, Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, mother and son psychiatrists, published two papers in the British Medical Journal, 1, 2 together with a variety of other publications and presentations and a bestselling book George III and the mad-business. This review is concerned with the nature of the recurrent mental ill health of King George III (1738–1820), reinvestigation of the widely accepted belief that he suffered from acute porphyria, how this unlikely diagnosis was obtained and, in particular, why it has gained so much unwarranted support. False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, as every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
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