Karl Marx was a miserable old sod who hated bourgeois convention and advocated class war not because of his experience in a German factory, but because of a face full of painful boils.
So writes a professor of dermatology, An Exegesis of Marx's Facial Boils
"The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day," Marx told Friedrich Engels in a letter from 1867.
In the Scent of a Fuhrer, I learned that Adolf Hitler couldn't control his own flatulence. He gave up meat and took up vegetables but his private physician
Dr. Theo Morell, recorded in his diary that after Hitler downed a typical vegetable platter, “constipation and colossal flatulence occurred on a scale I have seldom encountered before."
He resorted to a quack doctor who gave him Dr. Kosters anti-gas pills that contained strychnine and Hitler took up to 16 a day
The sallow skin, glaucous eyes and attention lapses noted by observers later in the war are consistent with strychnine poisoning; another ingredient in the pills, antropine, causes mood wings from euphoria to violent anger. Even more peculiar were the injections of amphetamines that Morell administered every morning before breakfast from 1941, which may have exacerbated the erratic behavior, inflexibility, paranoia and indecision that Hitler began to display increasingly as the war ground on. And there was a barrage of other supplements -- vitamins, testosterone, liver extracts, laxatives, sedatives, glucose and opiates, all intended to combat the dictator’s real or imagined ailments. After the war, U.S. intelligence officers discovered that Morell was pumping Hitler with 28 different drugs, including eye-drops that contained 10 percent cocaine (up to 10 treatment a day), a concoction made from human placenta and “potency pills” made from ground bull’s testicles. But despite the barrage of medicines, Morell’s diaries (which were recovered from Germany and are kept in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.) make clear that the bouts of “agonizing flatulence” remained a regular occurrence.