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An animated, cited guide for students and patients. Educational only, not medical advice. Your place is saved on this device.

Not medical adviceGout Companion is an educational synthesis of published literature for study and patient understanding. It does not replace a clinician. Doses and guideline statements are reported as published, not as instructions for any individual.

Part 6 · Context & review

History & people

Gout is one of the oldest named diseases: podagra to Hippocrates, crystals to van Leeuwenhoek, urate to Garrod, allopurinol to Elion and Hitchings. Press play to run the playhead from antiquity to today, or jump between eras. The scene above the timeline redraws itself as each era arrives.

The scene is a drawing of what changed in each era; every caption in it repeats a milestone below, with that milestone's sources in the note panel. The axis is compressed before 1650 and stretched after 1900 and again after 1990, so crowded recent decades stay readable. The outlook band is qualitative.

Every milestone

The dots on the timeline are also listed here, so they can be reached with the keyboard and read in order.

What it was called

Exam hookFive dates: 1679 van Leeuwenhoek sees needle crystals in a tophus · 1848 Garrod's thread test shows raised urate in gouty blood · 1961 McCarty and Hollander identify urate crystals by polarised light · 1966 allopurinol approved in the US (Nobel to Elion and Hitchings, 1988) · 2006 urate crystals shown to activate the NALP3 inflammasome. 101,106,145,250,254,255
In plain wordsPeople have described gout for more than 2,500 years. The crystals were seen in the 1600s, the chemistry was worked out in the 1700s and 1800s, and a daily pill that lowers urate arrived in the 1960s. Only in 2006 did scientists show how the crystals switch on the body's alarm.

Gout Companion is an educational synthesis of the published literature on gout, made for health-science study and for patient understanding.

It is not medical advice. It cannot diagnose, and nothing here should change a treatment without your own clinician. Guideline doses are quoted as published. Please check the original sources, which are listed in full in the Sources module.

Part of Medical Companions, animated and cited guides to one disease each. Also there: FMF Companion, whose colchicine and inflammasome modules this guide builds on, and Alzheimer's Companion.