The condition, coupled with anxiety attacks, ran in his family and plagued him from a very young age, when he was still simply a young lawyer in Illinois. As his law partner, William Henderson, once said, "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked."

As National Geographic writes, "He loathed jewelry and round objects and wouldn't touch hair. He was obsessed with the number three and polished every dining implement he used to perfection, using 18 napkins."

Those diagnoses, according to the journal, include depression, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, but also schizophrenia, which may have run in his family. However, other writers and physicians have since disputed this diagnosis.

Dozens of physicians and writers who either knew Hitler personally or studied him posthumously have advanced possible diagnoses of everything from schizophrenia to narcissistic personality disorder to sadistic personality disorder to antisocial personality disorder to Asperger's syndrome.

A team of doctors studied Putin's movement patterns and defensive behavior in large social settings to ultimately conclude that his "neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy" by some tragic event and that he now "carries a neurological abnormality."

And what some medical journals have now suggested is that these vulgar preoccupations — along with his vocal and motor tics — indicate that Mozart had Tourette's syndrome.

There, doctors noted that "neuropsychiatric examination disclosed auditory hallucinations, ideas of reference and suicide, and a rambling, grandiose, philosophical manner," diagnosed him with dementia praecox (schizophrenia), and discharged him on psychiatric grounds.

Both historians and medical journal writers have suggested that, perhaps stemming from the childhood abuse he received from his drunken father, Stalin developed a clinical paranoia that informed his more terroristic acts as dictator decades later.

Few, however, know that after Darwin returned from that voyage, he very seldom left home and lived as a recluse for the rest of his life.

The reason, according to recent research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association? Darwin suffered from agoraphobia and panic disorder.

"Had it not been for this illness," suggests the research, "his theory of evolution might not have become the all-consuming passion that produced On the Origin of Species."

"The evidence," writes the Journal of Medical Biography, "relates to his single-minded work routine, unusual lifestyle, limited interests, poor social and communication skills, and issues of life control."

Understanding that his "condition was verging on madness," as he later wrote, Munch entered a therapeutic clinic, where he received eight months of treatment (including electrifications) in 1908.

And while that may still be true — definitive diagnoses in cases from the BC era are of course difficult — new scholarship suggests that he may have actually suffered from small strokes instead, in addition to vertigo.

Indeed, some current scholarship suggests that the notoriously megalomaniacal French conqueror likely had NPD.

These journals even suggest that one can hear Beethoven's dramatic swings from suicidal depression to frenzied mania in the dramatic swings in dynamics and tempo in the man's music.

It remains somewhat unclear, however, whether the CIA used that term in its clinical sense (a mental disorder characterized by unstable moods, behavior, and relationships) or more loosely to refer to someone who simply, as Woodward writes, "alternated between crazy and noncrazy behavior."

Coupled with alcohol dependence and a traumatic brain injury, Hemingway frequently sank into long periods of depression before ultimately committing suicide at 61 in 1961.

Those who subscribe to this theory point to Newton's swings between periods of enraged mania (such as when he threatened to burn his parents house down with them inside it) and wallowing depression including delusions and hallucinations.

According to the journal, Woolf "experienced mood swings from severe depression to manic excitement and episodes of psychosis," all of which landed her in an institution for a time and informed her bouts of suicidal thoughts.

"After writing War and Peace," the journal reads, "his existence had been torn apart by a serious depression. This depression, which was melancholic in character, almost destroyed him and, once he had finished Anna Karenina, led him to want to renounce not only sexuality but also literary creation and material possessions."