Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written about geniuses. They talk about the formation of a worldview, the environment, the material situation - a word, about everything that, from the point of view of researchers, affects creativity. But very rarely - about the state of health. But it is precisely this that is sometimes the most powerful factor influencing the perception of the world.
MIRACLES OF THE FAT SHORTY
Once leaving a dinner party, Johannes Brahms said: "If you forgot to offend someone, excuse me, for God's sake!" However, no one paid attention to this phrase. Everyone knew that the composer had a bad character.
However, this was not always the case. In his youth, he was a man of the sweetest soul. The composer became irritable later, in adulthood. He recovered greatly, dropped his beard and began to drink. Especially amused by the many tourists who came to the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, how the famous musician often fell asleep in a cafe.
Over the years, Brahms ceased to monitor his appearance and often appeared on the street unshaven and with an unbuttoned collar, which at the end of the 19th century was considered a sign of bad taste.
But what everyone thought was the eccentricities of the fat little man was actually a disease with the outlandish name "apnea," or respiratory arrest, which was not considered a disease at the time. Attacks of obstructive sleep apnea, like most people, happened to Johannes Brahms in his sleep.
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Short-term breathing stops are caused by the fact that the lumen of the upper respiratory tract narrows in a person sleeping on his back due to an increase in the tonsils, uvula, soft palate, and various craniofacial anomalies.
All this impedes the flow of air during inhalation. A person begins to snore (the first sign of apnea), wakes up from lack of air, falls asleep after a few minutes, in order to wake up again soon. Some sufferers may wake up and fall asleep hundreds of times in a single night.
The result is daytime sleepiness, including episodes of short-term falling asleep, headaches, impaired concentration, memory, irritability, and depression.
The conclusion that Johannes Brahms suffered from obstructive sleep apnea for many years, came to the University of Pennsylvania professor Mitchell Margolis, a renowned specialist in lung diseases.
By the way, he is part of an informal group of scientists who, in their free time from their main work, study the diseases of great people, rightly believing that this will help to better understand their life and work.
WINE SERVING
Paul Wolf, professor of pathology at the University of California San Diego Medical Center, is a treasure trove of interesting information and anecdotal events from the lives of celebrities associated with disease.
He likes to say that the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, for example, wanted to become a priest, but left the seminary, realizing that he would not be able to hold Mass due to asthma. Or that the virtuoso violinist Niccolo Paganini was obliged to the incredible flexibility and mobility of the fingers of a very rare hereditary connective tissue disease.
Not everyone knows that the famous British politician William Pitt had great sympathy for the inhabitants of the North American colonies who wanted to secede from Great Britain, but because of gout, he could not defend their interests against King George III, who became unusually belligerent when his urine turned purple. shade. Georg suffered from porphyria, a hereditary metabolic disorder that eventually drove him insane.
Gout was very common among famous Englishmen in the 18th century. That's because, says Wolff, British gentlemen drank a lot of Portuguese red wine, which was infused in vats with lead-lined walls.
Lead poisoning has impaired kidney function, resulting in uric acid crystals being deposited in the lower extremities, such as the big toes, causing gout and severe pain.
The founding father of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, also suffered from gout. Perhaps because of the same red wine. True, he could have been poisoned, and working with printing inks, which included the same lead.
Acute bouts of pain forced Franklin to take off his shoes not only at home, but also in public. It is possible that he also signed the Declaration of Independence … barefoot.
STAR NIGHT VAN GOG
Artists occupy a special place in Wolf's research.
The French impressionist Claude Monet was much uncomfortable with cataracts. She not only made him see the world around him in reddish-yellow tones, but also prevented him from distinguishing colors, which is like death for a painter.
After cataract removal, as is often the case after such operations, the reddish-yellow tones were replaced by blue. It all ended with the fact that, on the advice of a Parisian ophthalmologist, he bought glasses with greenish-yellow lenses, after which the problems with flowers disappeared.
Vincent Van Gogh, Wolff argues, had so many serious illnesses that it’s amazing how he lived to be 37, and did not take his own life earlier.
Of particular interest to Paul Wolf was the so-called yellow palette of Van Gogh, who had a clear weakness for yellow. More recently, the theory was generally accepted that the dominance of yellow was caused by the famous Dutch painter's love for absinthe.
The composition of this popular drink in France included santonin, a medicine with the help of which worms were removed from babies in Europe at the end of the 19th century. Children who took santonin complained that their color palette was dominated by yellow.
Several years ago it was found that santonin acts differently on the body of adults and children. It turns out that in order to get the "yellow palette", an adult man needs to drink about 200 liters of absinthe.
Wolff solved this riddle with Starry Night, written by Vincent Van Gogh in 1889. At this time, the painter was treated for epileptic seizures with digitalis, a medicine obtained from the extract of the purple foxglove, which at the end of the nineteenth century was just beginning to be used to treat heart diseases.
The famous portrait of Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, the last physician of Van Gogh, painted in 1890, does not accidentally depict a purple foxglove.
As it turned out later, digitalis does not help from epilepsy, but it can be easily poisoned. Poisoning with this substance is often the main cause of "yellowness". People who have been poisoned with digitalis often complain that, for example, looking at the stars, they see yellow circles around them. Just like in Starry Night.
"If Van Gogh had not been mistakenly treated with digitalis," says Paul Wolff, "most likely he would not have seen the world around him in yellow tones."
Paul Cézanne's paintings are easily recognizable due to his unique painting style.
However, this style, according to many modern researchers, is a consequence of the artist's illness. Cezanne, who flatly refused to wear glasses, suffered from background retinopathy, a special form of myopia that is a consequence of diabetes.
Instead of objects with clear contours, a person with such a diagnosis sees blurred color spots. Hence the unusual artistic vision of the genius.
PROTECTOR OF THE DISAPPEARED
On a cold January day in 1960, a car accident occurred on a highway near Paris, in which Albert Camus, an outstanding thinker and humanist of the 20th century, a writer who was called the "conscience of the West", died.
Camus was not even 50 years old, and the terrible accident that caused his death for some time made his contemporaries forget that the writer had suffered from tuberculosis all his life - a serious illness that left an imprint on the psyche and themes of his books.
According to experts, no other disease has such an impact on the psyche as tuberculosis. Hypersensitivity and impressionability, phobias, depression, suicidal moods, impulsivity, a feeling of loneliness and alienation - all this is characteristic of patients with tuberculosis.
That is why the outcast and disadvantaged people received a reliable and devoted protector in the person of Camus. He felt them, empathized, sympathized. It is especially severe after the diagnosis.
Sergey BORODIN
