Could King Henry VIII have suffered from the same brain injuries affecting some modern-day football players? That's the question at the center of a new study looking at traumatic brain injury.
If you know anything about Henry VIII, it's probably this: he had a lot of wives. Six to be exact, two of whom he put to death. But the historical record also preserves something else about the mid-16th century English monarch: his nasty, impulsive temper, which is enshrined today in countless dramas like Showtime's The Tudors.
ArashSalardini, a behavioral neurologist at Yale University, said Henry VIII wasn't born as an erratic, cruel monarch -- instead, he thinks Henry's impulsiveness developed thanks to repeated traumatic brain injuries encountered while hunting and jousting.
"In 1524 he was unseated and he was hit in the head with a jousting stick," said Salardini. "It was actually through the visor, because he didn't have the visor down."
The following year, Henry VIII had an accident while hawking. Salardini said the King was vaulting, he fell, hit is head, and "he almost drowns," Salardini said. "He was, at least, dazed during that episode."
"[The year] 1536 is the big event. Where he's unhorsed, and the horse falls on top of him and he's described as being 'without' speech for two hours," said Salardini. "So he probably had repeated head injuries, not only the three episodes, which are major, but other minor ones throughout his life."
To reach the brain-injury conclusion, Salardini and his team reviewed volumes of letters and records from Henry and his court -- pairing those up with medical histories to track how Henry's injuries matched up with more and more instances of erratic behavior.
"He's given to fits of anger -- often with quite trivial instigation and he has little empathy with people who used to be his, essentially, chums," Salardini said. "Members of the aristocracy that he grew up with, and he becomes almost sociopathic in the way he chops off their heads at the smallest instigation," he continued. "There is also a cognitive aspect to all of this. His memory is terrible. He gives orders and doesn't remember them."
As a neurologist, Salardini said he came into the project thinking the Tudor king had a personality disorder, but his team's review of the literature changed that opinion.
He now supports a theory first put forward by a historian in 1931 arguing Henry's behavior was in fact due to head injury. "I'm now confident they're right. And the psychiatric explanation, which I thought was the explanation is actually not the case," he said.
The research was published in Journal of Clinical Neuroscience.
