Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical

In the observation of Sam Kean, “Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical opinions. Doctors have diagnosed Ebenezer Scrooge with OCD, Sherlock Holmes with autism, and Darth Vader with borderline personality disorder,” there lies both wit and warning — a reflection of our age’s hunger to explain mystery with diagnosis. Beneath the humor of his remark lies a deeper meditation on the human need to classify — to tame the wildness of character and imagination by binding it in the language of science. His words echo through the corridors of both medicine and philosophy: what happens when our curiosity, noble though it is, becomes obsession? When we forget that not all truths can be measured by instruments or placed within charts?

The origin of this quote springs from Kean’s background as a writer who bridges science and storytelling. He belongs to the lineage of thinkers who revere both logic and wonder, who understand that fiction and medicine share a common heart — the study of humanity. His comment arises not from contempt, but from amusement and concern: that we, in our zeal to analyze, might lose sight of the soul behind the symptoms. When physicians or readers label Scrooge, Holmes, or Vader with disorders, they are not wrong to find patterns; but they risk diminishing the mythic essence that gives these figures life beyond diagnosis. They forget that the heart of a story is not a medical chart, but the moral and spiritual transformation of the human being.

In the style of the ancients, we may say that Sam Kean speaks to the eternal tension between wisdom and cleverness. The clever mind dissects; the wise heart perceives. Just as the philosophers of Athens warned that “to measure all things is to lose the immeasurable,” so too does Kean’s statement remind us that not all that is meaningful can be explained. Ebenezer Scrooge was not created to represent obsessive compulsion; he was forged to teach redemption. Sherlock Holmes was not a study in neurodivergence, but an emblem of reason’s triumph and loneliness. Darth Vader was not a patient of psychiatry, but a parable of pride, loss, and the redemptive power of love. Their ailments are not of the body or mind, but of the human condition itself.

We might recall the Renaissance, when Leonardo da Vinci, in his quest to understand man, dissected cadavers by candlelight — yet even he, greatest of empiricists, bowed before the mystery of life. He knew that while the hand could be studied, the soul could only be contemplated. In our modern age, where data reigns as deity, Kean’s words serve as a quiet rebellion — a reminder that art and myth are not specimens, but living mirrors of ourselves. To label them too quickly is to strip them of wonder, to turn poetry into pathology.

There is wisdom, too, in Kean’s gentle irony. For his examples — Scrooge, Holmes, and Vader — represent the spectrum of human struggle. Each carries within him both genius and torment, logic and longing. To medicalize them is tempting because they reflect our own inner contradictions. Yet what makes them eternal is not the precision of their symptoms, but the truth of their journeys: Scrooge’s awakening to generosity, Holmes’s isolation within intellect, Vader’s fall and final redemption. Their power lies not in their diagnosable traits, but in their capacity to speak to our moral and emotional selves.

And so the lesson reveals itself: interpret, but do not imprison. Science, noble in its precision, must remember humility before mystery. Not everything broken needs a label; not every shadow can be charted. The ancients taught that balance lies in knowing where knowledge must end and reverence must begin. In art, as in life, the most profound understanding comes not from dissection, but from empathy — from standing before another being, fictional or real, and saying, “I see you,” not “I have named you.”

Let this be our guide: to read deeply, to question bravely, but to preserve the sacred spark of the inexplicable. For when we reduce the myth to diagnosis, we lose the heartbeat of creation itself. Sam Kean’s jest is therefore a moral lesson — that wisdom is not the act of explaining everything, but of knowing which things are meant to remain unmeasured.