The article about ME (The Argus, May 12) suggests Florence Nightingale (pictured) may have been a sufferer of this illness.

Although she is often mentioned in connection with the illness, I remain sceptical.

I can see how sufferers of this ghastly disease may derive a certain moral strength from seeing themselves in an illustrious tradition of eminent invalids who, as well as Nightingale, include Charles Darwin, Anna Sewell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martinueau and Marcel Proust.

But I take the view ME is a disease specific to the modern, Western world, deriving from the colossal overload placed on our systems nowadays by our stressful and unhealthy lifestyles and by the spread of toxins, chemicals and various forms of radiation and electro-pollution with which we are bombarded.

I doubt whether this existed before the Fifties. In fact, Nightingale's illness is now thought to have been brucellosis, contracted from infected milk drunk in the Crimea.

It is significant that, although bedridden for years, she got a prodigious amount of work done during that time, whereas, of course, the averaged bedridden ME sufferer is capable of next to nothing.

Darwin's illness, possibly some kind of immune system dysfunction caused by the chemicals he used for preserving botanical specimens, is closer to ME symptoms.

There is nothing wrong with identifying with these historical invalids, especially as they often had to put up with the same kind of misdiagnosis and medical prejudice that ME sufferers do today.

I have often derived strength from reading about Proust, laid out flat with fatigue in his cork-lined apartment.

But I don't fool myself that Proust had ME.

-Graham Chainey, Brighton