Morris's behaviour was often erratic. He was of a nervous disposition, and throughout his life relied on networks of male friends to aid him in dealing with this. Morris' friends nicknamed him "Topsy" after a character in "Uncle Tom's Cabin". He had a wild temper and when sufficiently enraged could suffer seizures and blackouts. Rossetti was known to taunt Morris to enrage him for the amusement of himself and their other friends. Biographer Fiona MacCarthy suggests that Morris might have suffered from a form of Tourette's syndrome as he exhibited some of the symptoms. In later life he suffered from gout, a common complaint among middle-class males in the Victorian period. Morris's ethos was that one should "have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." He also held to the view that "No work which cannot be done with pleasure in the doing is worth doing" and adopted as his motto "As I can" from the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck.