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Medicine: Genius & Madness

2 minute read
TIME

Wordsworth contended that nobody should pry into the private lives of authors. “Our business,” said he, “is with their books—to understand them.” But topflight London Neurologist Walter Russell Brain is curious about the writers themselves. In the current Journal of the British Medical Association, Dr. Brain reports on some medico-literary autopsies which expose the mental instability of many a genius.

Some great writers, says Dr. Brain, were insane in the strict sense “that they would today have been regarded as certifiable.” Others, although not certifiable, were manic-depressives, obsessionals, alcoholics or drug addicts. Among mentally sick writers of all nations he includes Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Goethe, Poe, Rousseau and Strindberg. Some Brain case histories and diagnoses of fellow Englishmen:

¶John Donne had a morbid obsession with death (“. . . Never seek to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”) which prompted him to pose in a shroud for the sketch of his own monument, and keep the picture at his bedside until his death wish was fulfilled.

¶Jonathan Swift’s preoccupation with scatology in Gulliver’s Travels suggested a mind that “was emotionally arrested at an infantile stage of development.”

¶Samuel Johnson, “the great convulsionary, [was] a kind of intellectual John Bull, dogmatic, tough and rather insensitive . . . beneath [whose] assured demeanor lay a torment .of apprehensiveness, doubt and misgivings . . .” His antics suggested St. Vitus’ dance but were actually of psychic, not organic, origin. Obsessed with a sense of guilt and fears of insanity and death, Johnson prescribed his own remedy for fits of melancholia: busying himself with involved arithmetical problems.

¶James Boswell was a manic-depressive whose brother and daughter went insane.

¶Charles Dickens’ alternate periods of elation and depression were blended with sadomasochism, the marks of which run “like a scarlet thread through all his writings” (especially in the unbridled violence of A Tale of Two Cities’).

No man is a great creative artist because he is a psychopath, concludes Dr. Brain, but if he has the other necessary qualities of mind, what the psychiatrist would call pathological may be an essential element in his genius.

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