The most famous celebrity patient of recent years is Lance Armstrong, who survived advanced testicular cancer, returned to cycling, and won the Tour de France seven times. He also became an activist, formed a foundation, spoke widely about the disease, and published a bestselling book about his experience.

Barron H Lerner

Johns Hopkins University Press, $25, pp 352 ISBN 0 8018 8462 4 www.press.jhu.edu/

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But the first celebrity patient, says Dr Barron Lerner, was Lou Gehrig, the famous American baseball player, who became ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—still known in the United States as “Lou Gehrig's disease”—in 1938 and died in 1941. Gehrig was a star hitter for the New York Yankees, a tall, strong, shy man nicknamed “the Iron Horse” for his endurance.

During the summer of 1938, he was in a slump, but played better toward the end of the …