Books: Conspicuous Consumption

TUBERCULOSIS AND GENIUS—Lewis J.

Moorman — University of Chicago Press ($2.50).

Despite the mountain air of Parnassus, the nine Muses probably have hacking coughs. Genius and tuberculosis, as critics and physicians have long noted, occur together oftener than coincidence accounts for. Dr. Lewis Jefferson Moorman, onetime dean of the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, takes this thesis for granted, illustrates and defines it in Tuberculosis and Genius this week.

Long-distance autopsies are risky. French Scholar Denis Saurat enraged the high-minded by “demonstrating” that blind John Milton (like deaf Ludwig van Beethoven) suffered from hereditary syphilis. Diagnostician Moorman finds Milton tuberculous. Other famous consumptives: Pope, Dr. Johnson, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Descartes, Balzac, Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Chekhov, Dostoevski, a brow-wrinkling list of other writers and thinkers. Doctors suspect that tuberculosis develops genius because 1) apprehension of death inspires a burning awareness of life’s beauty, significance, transience, 2) the bacillus breeds restlessness and an intoxicated hypersensitiveness.

Dr. Moorman discusses notable cases of consumptive genius—or as consumptive Katherine Mansfield called it, “the faint glitter on the plant that the frost has laid a finger on.” A year before his death in 1894 Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “For 14 years I have not had a day’s real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness. . . .” Yet always his work grew better, for mental activity and creative power often increase with the disease. Stevenson’s travels through Provence, U. S. mountains, the South Seas to his Samoan grave suggest not only a search for healthful air but the consumptive’s itch for vagabondage.

Jean Baptiste Poquelin, son of respectable parents, assumed the name “Móliere” when he joined an unrespectable troupe of vagabond players. For 13 years he mimed through the provinces, died at 51, coughing and spitting blood, less than an hour after playing the title role in his Le Malade Imaginaire. Concludes Dr. Moorman: “Móliere rendered a great service to humanity through his satirical arraignment of the medical profession. The antiquated and extravagant practices of the Paris Faculty . . . inflamed his genius for reform. . . . Soon after Moliere’s death, Paris was leading the world in medical thought.”

Tuberculous Voltaire lived wizened and fire-eyed for 84 years. “In individuals in whom the tubercle bacillus grows meagerly . . .” observed Dr. Lawrence F. Flick, “[it] may make life more pleasant and make the individual more profitable to society than he otherwise would be.” The passionate life-lust of John Keats’s odes and sonnets is ironically accounted for in his autopsy: “The lungs were entirely gone; the doctors could not understand how he had lived the last two months.” Professors often shake sad heads over their belief that had Keats (who died at 25) lived an average lifetime, his stature would rival Shakespeare’s. Dr. Moorman’s study indicates that a non-tuberculous, long-lived Keats would probably not have been Keats.

Dr. Moorman seldom pauses over the art of his defunct patients, but to critics he offers the disturbing observation of his colleague, Dr. Arthur Clarence Jacobson: “The decline in tuberculosis coincides with the decline in creative writing. . . .”