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 RECAP 
 
 TUBERCULOSIS 
 
 AND 
 
 THE CREATIVE MIND 
 
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 BY 
 
 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON, M.D. 
 
 BROOKLYN, N. Y. 
 
 ALBERT T, HUNTINGTON 
 
 1909 
 
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TUBERCULOSIS 
 
 AND 
 
 THE CREATIVE MIND 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON, M.D 
 
 BROOKLYN, N. Y. 
 ALBERT T HUNTINGTON 
 
 1909 
 
: 3 ii i i 
 
 Reprinted from 
 
 MEDICAL LIBRARY AND HISTORICAL JOURNAL 
 
 DECEMBER, 1907 
 
 AND FROM 
 
 THE ^SCULAPIAN, DECEMBER, 1908 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 
 By Arthur C. Jacobson, M.D., 
 
 Brooklyn-New York. 
 
 "Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings." — Shakespeare. 
 "The sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all 
 facts." — Emerson. 
 
 I 
 
 F every evil has its good, what good has that devastating 
 scourge, the great white plague, left in its wake? 
 
 For one thing, it has left a fearful lesson upon 
 insanitary living and its inevitable penalties. 1 It has been a harsh 
 pedagogue and has played no favorites. All mankind must con- 
 form to its prescribed curriculum, else prince and pauper alike 
 receive the tragic demerit of tuberculous infection. 
 
 For another thing, its just vengeance, though terrible 
 enough, is tempered with mercy, a mercy which, by way of com- 
 pensation for the physical ravages with which we are all so 
 grewsomely familiar, reveals itself in that saving grace, the spes 
 phthisica, a trait which, with its associated general psychic 
 excitation, has not only enabled the individual victims of tuber- 
 culosis to bear their burdens of disease most cheerfully, but has 
 been a means of quickening genius, a fact wherefrom have flowed 
 benefits that concern the whole world of intellect. 
 
 Someone has said that, next to the Newgate Calendar, the 
 biography of authors is the most sickening chapter in the history 
 of man. Heaven knows that Nordau has illumined the subject 
 from his peculiar point of view. Some phases of the chapter are 
 especially sickening to medical men, as for example De Quincey's 
 expressed admiration of the hydrocephalic head of his sister: 
 " — thou whose head, for its superb intellectual developments, was 
 the astonishment of science, — * * *. For thou, dear noble 
 Elizabeth, around whose ample brow, as often as thy sweet coun- 
 tenance rises upon the darkness, I fancy a tiara of light, or a 
 gleaming aureola, in token of thy premature intellectual grandeur 
 — thou * * * pillar of fire," etc. Again, the face of Christina 
 
 1 Tuberculosis imposes upon the United States alone an annual loss 
 of about $200,000,000. (Osier's "Modern Medicine.") 
 
4 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 Rossetti became the type of a certain anemic ideal of pre- 
 Raphaelite female beauty. She was a model for Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Holman Hunt. Now the chief 
 feature of her face, worshipped by the pre-Raphaelites because of. 
 a certain pensive, wistful, melancholy expression, was her eyes. 
 To these hysterical esthetes this spelled transcendent beauty, yet 
 the horridly matter-of-fact explanation of it all was exophthalmic 
 bronchocele, which afflicted her in April, 1871, lasted two years, 
 and from the distressing effects of which she never recovered. 
 The condition is especially manifest in D. G. Rossetti's drawing 
 of Christina and her mother. 
 
 As the litterateur or artist may, occasionally, be inspired in 
 the above manner by pathologic objects outside of himself, so, too, 
 his own psychopathology may inspire him to creative labors, or at 
 least color his productions ; thus it is easy to discern the influence 
 of psychopathologic states upon the works of such writers as 
 Poe, Guy deMaupassant, Tasso, Cowper, Swift, Byron and St. 
 John the Evangelist. The morbid imaginings of the first and 
 second, the coprolalia of Swift, the illusions and hallucinations of 
 St. John, the melancholia of Cowper, as reflected by their writ- 
 ings, are symptomatic of unhealthy mental states. Even the 
 pure mind of Tennyson had its moments of regrettable aberra- 
 tion, for to what else can we ascribe his characterization of Lord 
 Lytton, than which it would be hard to find anything nastier: 
 
 "What profits now to understand 
 The merits of a spotless shirt — 
 A dapper boot — a little hand — 
 // half the little soul is dirt? . . ." 
 
 Who is there familiar with only the beauties of Tennyson's mind 
 and verse that would suspect him of having been possessed of 
 such a talent for vileness? There was more need at such a 
 moment for a few grains of calomel than for a poem. 
 
 Now it is entirely conceivable that the tuberculous by- 
 products are capable of profoundly affecting the mechanism 
 of creative minds in such a way as to influence markedly the 
 creations. Indeed, they are bound to do so, for the spes 
 phthisica, admittedly a result of such by-products, must neces- 
 sarily affect the whole psychological switchboard. This is all 
 that the present writer seeks to establish. Yet he does not 
 maintain that it is possible to reason backward and to say, of given 
 passages, "these were written by one afflicted with tuberculosis." 
 The pathologist likes to know the clinical history of the cancer 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 5 
 
 suspect from whose growth scrapings have been taken before 
 he pronounces his judgment. No neurologist could name 
 Cowper's malady, however much he might suspect a mental 
 twist, even after the most careful study of his poems, but, 
 knowing the man's pathetic life struggle with the depression 
 which finally overwhelmed him, its influence upon his writings 
 becomes a self-evident proposition. 
 
 Dana, in his "Nervous Diseases," gives "an almost sure 
 recipe for producing a case of paresis." A man of nervous 
 constitution and dissipated habits acquires syphilis between the 
 ages of twenty and thirty. He continues to drink alcohol to 
 excess and to play the game of life hard. In ten or fifteen 
 years he will be pretty sure to have paresis. Similarly, were 
 the present writer to give an almost sure recipe for producing 
 the highest type of the creative mind, he would postulate an 
 initial spark of genius plus tuberculosis. 
 
 It is natural to think, a priori, that the pathological can 
 account for little in literature or in art except the morbid, the 
 abnormal, the depressed. This is doubtless true in the main, 
 but, a posteriori, we must except tuberculosis. Certain cele- 
 brated victims have been, par excellence, the creators of the 
 highest and best. The layman, unfamiliar with the curious 
 mental trait of consumptives already alluded to, will be apt to 
 reason that such men accomplished great things despite their 
 infirmity, and that had they not been hampered by it, they would 
 have accomplished still greater ones. On the other hand, the 
 physician will find the explanation to lie most readily in that 
 characteristic clinical trait of the tuberculous, the spes 
 phthisical Their lives are shortened, physically, but quickened 
 psychically in a ratio inversely as the shortening. The 
 layman's reasoning is sound in a general sense, fallacious in a 
 particular sense. Relatively abnormal hopefulness, optimism, 
 buoyancy, represent the prevailing 5 psychologic phase of tuber- 
 culosis. Out of this closely related trinity, too, grows the 
 factitious physical energy of the victims. Upon his death-bed 
 the consumptive makes plans for twenty years ahead. Far 
 
 2 "Death catches him like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying 
 out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, 
 and his mouth full of boastful language." 
 
 "Some dispositions seem as the disease advances to become so ethereal 
 that they suggest another sphere." 
 
 3 States of depression do occasionally occur. (Exemplified by Keats, 
 Stevenson, Schiller.) 
 
6 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 advanced in disease, he crosses an ocean in the steerage and a 
 continent in an emigrant train in quest of a sick friend (Robert 
 Louis Stevenson), or acts superbly in the theater on the day 
 of his death (Moliere). Every practitioner is familiar with 
 the extraordinary trait which enables the advanced consumptive 
 to declare that he feels "bully" when his temperature is 104 , 
 which enables him to walk about, to work, and fully to exercise 
 the sexual function. 4 In no other disease with equally extensive 
 lesions is the psychical and consequently the physical status 
 equally exalted, or, we might truly say, exalted at all. Potential 
 indeed must be the mental driving force which gets power out 
 of a pitiable wreck. 
 
 The writer has chosen all his concrete examples from 
 among the litterateurs, for the reason that it was necessary to 
 limit the study, unless he were to write a rather huge book, so 
 numerous have been the instances among all classes of creative 
 minds. Thus, in the domain of art, he might have discussed 
 the cases of Raphael, of Bastien-Lepage, of Jacquemart, of 
 Trutat, of Habington, of Henry O'Neil, of W. H. Deverell, or of 
 Watteau, who shaped the art of eighteenth century France. 
 From among musical geniuses he might have selected Paganini, 
 Von Weber, Chopin, Nevin and Purcell; from among dramatic 
 artists, Rachel; from among physicians, Laennec, Bichat, Rush, 
 Trudeau, Godman and William Pepper (secundus) ; from 
 among theologians, John Calvin ; from among statesmen, Cicero ; 
 and from among empire builders, Cecil Rhodes. The great 
 lights of literature have been selected for this reason and because 
 of the writer's entire belief in the aphorism of Dr. Johnson, to 
 wit: "The chief glory of every people arises from its authors." 
 
 To be sure, tuberculosis doesn't convert all talented persons 
 into geniuses, nor mediocre people into talented ones. More- 
 over, many geniuses have not been tuberculous. Again, 
 tuberculosis is not infrequently a result, and not a cause, of 
 literary industry, although in such instances it may prove to be 
 an intellectual asset. Right here the writer will say that he is 
 not attempting to do anything more than to reason inductively 
 
 * Sidney Lanier's four children were all born during the active period 
 of his disease. "The final consuming fever opened in May, 1880. In 
 July he went with Mrs. Lanier and her father to Westchester, Pa., where 
 a fourth son was born in August. * * * This winter brought a hand- 
 to-hand battle for life. In December he came to the very door of death." 
 — William Hayes Ward. 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. J 
 
 from certain facts. This reasoning is governed only by the 
 probable. It is the same reasoning that we apply to all the 
 phenomena of disease. Were we to abandon such a method 
 we would end by questioning the validity of nearly all those 
 postulates upon which modern medicine is founded, when as a 
 matter of fact we know that these postulates enable us to solve 
 bedside problems very successfully. They work well. Thus 
 we would question the relation of syphilis to general paralysis 
 and locomotor ataxia. This disease, we would say, doesn't 
 always produce those quartenary sequelae in its victims. Such 
 terminations are the exception, not the rule. Moreover, there are 
 paretics and tabetics in whom the fact of antecedent specific 
 disease cannot be established. 
 
 This subject might be considered from four points of view. 
 First, from that which considers only the man of genius suffer- 
 ing from tuberculosis in its frankest and most active form; 
 second, from that which considers the man of genius who has 
 been afflicted at some early period in his life, and who has 
 apparently recovered, e. g., Sir Walter Scott; third, from that 
 which considers the man of genius who is of the phthisical habit 
 and who may (Thoreau, Merimee, and the author of "Hudibras") 
 or may not (Edward Gibbon, Leopardi) develop actual consump- 
 tion; and fourth, from that which considers the man or woman 
 of genius, apparently not tuberculous, as a product of admittedly 
 tuberculous stock, e. g., Robert Burns, Edgar Allan Poe, Eugenie 
 de Guerin, J. A. Froude, Sainte-Beuve, Franqois Coppee, John 
 Stuart Mill, William Cullen Bryant, Harriet Martineau, Byron, 
 Charles Dickens. If we take the broad ground covered by all 
 four of these viewpoints we have much indeed upon which to base 
 our study. The bearing of the last upon the subject the author 
 leaves mainly to the reader's own conjecture; that of the second 
 and third he includes in his study in tentative fashion; that of 
 the first he founds his thesis upon with no doubt in his own mind 
 as to its absolute relevance. 
 
 This matter of tuberculous stock cannot be lightly dismissed. 
 While we must, perhaps, accept Weismann's anti-Lamarckian 
 teaching that the acquired characteristics of parents do not 
 become the natural ones of the offspring, that is to say, are not 
 actually transmitted, yet we are not obliged to believe that such 
 acquired characteristics are without influence of any sort upon 
 the offspring. However, there is no use of engaging in a discus- 
 sion that would trench closely upon the academic. 
 
8 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 II. 
 
 We shall now proceed directly to a study of those literary 
 geniuses in whom tuberculosis appears to have been a more or 
 less direct factor in exciting, if not inaugurating, creative ideas 
 of the highest order. 5 We cannot, of course, account in this way 
 for superb technique, nor perhaps in any case for the initial spark 
 of genius. We merely predicate it, then, to be a quickener, excit- 
 ant or inspirer of germinating or flowering faculties of extra- 
 ordinary potentiality, which even without its influence would 
 have marked their possessors as men of remarkable talent or 
 moderate genius. 
 
 John Milton. — The picture of "John Milton at the Age of 
 Twelve," in the collection of the Provost of Eton College, re- 
 veals his fragile, spiritual type of beauty as a child. The mature 
 Milton is revealed as a sickly, hollow-cheeked man in the Faith- 
 orne engraving, after the crayon portrait at Bayfordbury (see 
 also the George Vertue engraving). 
 
 Milton was known at Cambridge as "The Lady of Christ's," 
 because of his delicate beauty. 
 
 He was buried at St. Giles's, Cripplegate, and in the burial 
 registers of this church is to be found the entry : "John Milton, 
 gentleman, consumption, chancel." 
 
 John Locke. — The author of the "Essay Concerning the 
 Human Understanding" was also the author of an "Essay on 
 Tussis," inspired by his personal interest in the subject of cough. 
 
 While writing the famous treatises on psychology, religion, 
 education, government and finance which have exercised such a 
 remarkable influence on the world's progress and civilization, 
 Locke was all the time a victim of tuberculosis. Great Syden- 
 ham, the English Hippocrates, with whom he was closely asso- 
 ciated in medical practice (Locke was a physician), tried hard to 
 cure him. 
 
 5 It is impossible always to secure definite data as to the illnesses of 
 famous literary geniuses. Many are said to have died of "declines," of 
 "general breakdowns of the system," of "pulmonary affections," of "wast- 
 ing diseases," of "continued coughs and fevers," of "catarrhal affections," 
 "throat troubles," etc., etc. Much may be roughly inferred from all this. 
 Even the records left by physicians are usually inexact and unscientific. 
 Tuberculosis has also been regarded as a sort of stigma, hence is some- 
 times deliberately veiled under other terms. There are good reasons for 
 inferring that Louis, the great French clinician, and Sir Thomas Browne, 
 were both phthisical in their young manhood. 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 9 
 
 The Burrower portrait reveals the physiognomy and physique 
 which we associate with the phthisical diathesis. 
 
 Alexander Pope. — Pope was a victim of Pott's disease of the 
 spine. Morley notes that his father was similarly deformed. 
 The immediate causes of his death were asthma and dropsy. 
 He had a "crazy carcase." At seventeen he very nearly died. 
 "Let those who judge him," say Garnett and Gosse, "read the 
 account of that long disease, his life." He required to be lifted 
 out of bed, and could not stand until he was laced into a sort 
 of armor. He described himself as "a lively little creature, 
 with long legs and arms; a spider is no ill emblem of him; he 
 has been taken at a distance for a small windmill." Always a 
 sick man, we may suspect that the tuberculous fires smouldered 
 throughout his life. Sufficient by-products were perhaps 
 liberated to act as a kind of lash to what would have been an 
 extraordinary mind, even if its possessor had had a normal 
 body. 
 
 Dr. Samuel Johnson. — Johnson was afflicted throughout 
 much of his life by what appears to have been lupus vulgaris. 
 This was the cause of the unsightly scars which marked his 
 face. His health was always precarious, because of his 
 "scrofulous taint," as it was then called. He came of "scrofu- 
 lous" stock. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott. — Although Scott died at the age of sixty- 
 one, after a life of prodigious industry, his health was not 
 always good. He seems to have maintained it only by much 
 exercise and care. It is true that he was tall and that his chest 
 and arms were powerfully developed. In 1788, when he was 
 about seventeen years of age, Scott had a pulmonary hemor- 
 rhage, which was followed by a lengthy illness. Previous to 
 this, when a child of eighteen months, Scott had what his 
 surgeon, Dr. Charles Creighton, called "a swelling at the ankle." 
 It was this affliction which left him partially crippled. The 
 distressing physical conditions under which he wrote "Ivanhoe" 
 and the "Bride of Lammermoor" do not appear to have been 
 related to his tuberculous troubles. One of the children of his 
 daughter Sophia (Mrs. Lockhart) died of tuberculosis. 
 
 Percy Bysshe Shelley. — Shelley sank into incipient phthisis 
 in 1817. His health had "failed" in 1815. He went to Italy 
 on account of his health in 18 18. To this period belong 
 "Rosalind and Helen," "The Cenci" and "Prometheus 
 Unbound," "To a Skylark," "Oedipus Tyrannus," "Epipsychi- 
 
IO ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 dion," "Ode to the West Wind," "Adonais," "Hellas" and the 
 unfinished "Triumph of Life." These certainly represent his 
 most "soaring thought." He was drowned in July, 1822. "No 
 greater gift to poetry was ever given by a poet within a twelve- 
 month than Shelley's gift of 1819." 
 
 John Keats. — Keats' s mother died of tuberculosis. In 
 December, 1818, his brother Tom, tenderly nursed by the poet, 
 succumbed to the same disease. (He had also nursed the 
 mother.) By the autumn of 1819, after twenty months of 
 wonderful work, "an achievement unparalleled in the history 
 of English poetry, Keats had produced almost all the works 
 on which his fame rests." He died on February 23, 1821. 
 The breaking down of his health dated from the time 
 of Tom's death. He was eager, enthusiastic, resolute. He 
 speaks of "the violence of his temperament." Of him it 
 may be truly said, using his own phrases, that he "died into 
 life," destroyed by "the fever and the fret." Other great 
 poets have warmed themselves at the fire of Keat's genius 
 and gained much of their own inspiration therefrom. Among 
 them have been Hood, Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, Coleridge, 
 and a whole host besides. He still strongly influences much of 
 the poetry of to-day. He may be credited, then, in a sense, 
 with a large share of the parentage of many of our greatest 
 poems. "His influence may be traced in the tendencies to 
 choose subjects from Greek mythology, to describe nature 
 imaginatively but without much of the Wordsworthian spirit- 
 uality, to saturate language with color, and to aim at felicity 
 of phrase. It is also visible in many paintings." 
 
 Thomas Hood. — "A tendency to consumption on the 
 mother's side, fatal to three of her children and ultimately to 
 herself, was at the root of those complicated disorders which 
 made the life of Thomas Hood 'one long disease.' " "The 
 Song of the Shirt" (Christmas number of Punch, 1843), "The 
 Haunted House," "The Lay of the Labourer" and "The Bridge 
 of Sighs" were all written at a time when his disease was almost 
 in the terminal stage, "proving that, as the darkness of his own 
 prospects deepened, the sympathies with his kind deepened also, 
 and quickened his finest genius." 
 
 Laurence Sterne. — Sterne's health broke about the time of 
 his first success (the two first volumes of "Tristram Shandy"). 
 "The Sentimental Journey" was published on February 28, 1768, 
 and Sterne died of consumption on March 18 of the same year. 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. II 
 
 He was one of a very large family, most of whom died in early 
 childhood. His father died in 1731 of an "impaired 
 constitution." 
 
 The "Journey" through France and Italy was undertaken 
 in 1765, in an attempt to prolong his life. 
 
 Of the temperament of Sterne, no better summary can be 
 given than is provided by himself, when, after describing some 
 misfortune, he says : "But I'll lay a guinea that in half-an-hour 
 I shall be as merry as a monkey, and forget it all." 
 
 "His unseemly, passionate, pathetic life burned itself away 
 at the age of fifty-four, only the last eight of which had been 
 concerned with literature" (Garnett and Gosse). 
 
 Thomas De Quincey. — "De Quincey, a dreamer of beautiful 
 dreams, * * * sought with intense concentration of effort 
 after a conscientious and profound psychology of letters." 
 From our point of view the psychology of a great intellect as 
 modified by tuberculosis plus opium. 6 
 
 By some it is felt that this very drug habit actually 
 hindered, in some way, the full expression of De Quincey's 
 genius. His biographer Page says that "he did not become a 
 dreamer because he fell under the spell of opium," and De 
 Quincey himself says : "Habitually to dream magnificently, a 
 man must have a constitutional determination to reverie." 
 
 De Quincey's father died of tuberculosis and a sister of 
 tuberculous meningitis. 
 
 Surgeon-Major W. C. B. Eatwell, who studied De Quincey 
 from a medical standpoint, points out certain manifestations of 
 tuberculosis in a cerebral form in De Quincey's childhood. He 
 showed decided evidences of the disease still later. De Quincey 
 himself, in the "Confessions," says that before he wrote that 
 book he had been pronounced repeatedly a martyr-elect to pul- 
 monary consumption. "Without something like a miracle in 
 my favor, I was instructed to regard myself a condemned 
 subject. * * * These opinions were pronounced by the 
 highest authorities in Christendom. * * * Out of eight 
 children I was the one who most closely inherited the bodily 
 conformation of a father who had died of consumption at the 
 early age of thirty-nine. * * * I offered at the first glance 
 to a medical eye every symptom of phthisis broadly and con- 
 
 8 Gerrier, of Lyons, questions De Quincey's statements anent the influ- 
 ence of opium upon him, since his descriptions of opium symptoms are 
 more than inexact; they are false. 
 
12 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 spicuously developed. The hectic colours in the face, the 
 nocturnal perspirations, the growing embarrassment of the 
 respiration, and other expressions of gathering feebleness under 
 any attempts at taking exercise, all these symptoms were steadily 
 accumulating between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four." 
 
 He thought that the use of opium in some way stopped the 
 further progress of his malady, although he had no such notion 
 in his mind when he began its use. It was first taken to relieve 
 a neuralgia. 
 
 De Quincey died at the age of seventy-five of what his 
 physician, Dr. Warburton Begbie, describes as a catarrhal, 
 febrile affection of the chest with exhaustion of the system. 
 The doctor attended him from October 22, 1859, to December 8 
 of the same year. 
 
 "The Confessions" were written at the age of thirty-seven. 
 
 Elisabeth Barrett Browning. — Mrs Browning's "lung 
 affection" began in 1836, at the age of thirty. A pulmonary 
 hemorrhage occurred in 1837. The trouble has been described 
 as a "bronchial affection." Again, biographers characterize 
 it as "grave mischief in the lungs." Spinal trouble, which we 
 may suspect to have been tuberculous spondylitis, is also 
 mentioned. This would seem to be an instance in which, for 
 some reason, those in possession of the exact facts seem to 
 regard candor as inappropriate. The security of her fame and 
 the loveableness of her character only make this reticence the 
 more priggish. Her life of invalidism and of great achievement 
 is familiar to all. Obiit 1861. 
 
 Kate Field said that it was difficult to believe that such a 
 fairy hand could pen thoughts of such ponderous weight. 
 
 Moliere. — Moliere was quite a typical example of the 
 tuberculous diathesis 7 and died of hemorrhage after years of 
 semi-invalidism on February 17, 1673. Only death itself, how- 
 ever, interrupted his brilliant career as actor and author. 
 
 Henry Thoreau. — The health of Thoreau, another quite 
 typical example of the tuberculous diathesis throughout his 
 strange life, failed completely in 1861. Died 1862. 
 
 "In Thoreau, * * * it was the spirit more than the 
 temple in which it dwelt, that made the man." (Ricketson.) 
 
 7 In many instances it is unquestionably correct to state that the so- 
 called phthisical habit is not an indication of a tendency to, but actually 
 of the existence of, tuberculosis (Cohnheim — Osier). Those recent addi- 
 tions to our diagnostic resources, the Von Pirquet, the Moro and the Cal- 
 mette or Wolff-Eisner — Vallee tests, have many times confirmed this 
 teaching. 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 13 
 
 Johann Christian Friedrich Schiller. — Schiller's fatal sick- 
 ness began in the summer of 1804. He died on May 9, 1805. 
 On the eighth, when asked how he felt, he replied, evidently 
 referring to his mental state, "Better and better, more and more 
 cheerful." Again he said, with characteristic optimism, "Death 
 can be no evil, for it is universal." 
 
 Some doubt is expressed by Schiller's biographers as to 
 whether he really had phthisis. There appear to have been some 
 anomalous symptoms. The writer has studied the available data 
 very carefully and he finds it impossible to surmise what the 
 disease was if it was not phthisis. Even his very typical spes 
 phthisica was not the most characteristic of the cardinal symp- 
 toms. There would appear to be no occasion for befogging 
 the facts other than the one exemplified by the biographers of 
 Mrs. Browning. Still, we must not forget that in those days 
 the specific bacillus had not been isolated — nor was the art of 
 medicine unimpeachable. 
 
 His first attack of blood-spitting occurred in 1791. He 
 never entirely recovered and this first attack was in reality his 
 sentence of death. He was then thirty-two. At the time of his 
 death he was forty-six. "It is possible," says his biographer 
 Nevinson, "that the disease served in some way to increase his 
 eager activity, and fan his intellect into keener Hame." "He 
 wrote his finest and sublimest works when his health was gone." 
 (Carlyle.) 
 
 "The Song of the Bell" was written in 1799. 
 
 "His face expressed a fiery ardor. * * * His enthusi- 
 asm clothed the universe with grandeur. * * * His was 
 an imagination never weary of producing grand or beautiful 
 forms." (Carlyle.) 
 
 His biographers tell us that he had an inexhaustible fund 
 of cheerfulness and hope. Difficulties were thrown off, disap- 
 pointments left behind. Before the critics had time to say their 
 worst of one work, he was borne far beyond their reach by 
 enthusiasm over the creation of the next. 
 
 "Some fortunate gift of temperament lifted him," says 
 Meister, "like a god." 
 
 "Inspired by hope and an unquestioning confidence in the 
 objects of his enthusiasm, in their sufficiency and ultimate 
 triumph, he passed unscathed amidst the perils of indolence, 
 hesitation and despair, as well as through the ordinary trials of 
 poverty, sickness, and failure. He seemed to bear a charmed 
 
14 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 life, and the enchantment passed from him to others. (So we have 
 seen it was with Keats too.) Eager and unresting in the pur- 
 suit of his ideals, 'a new and more complete man every week,' 
 he seemed to diffuse energy and enthusiasm as he went." 
 
 He was the inspiring friend of Goethe, whose mind was of 
 a grander type. "Schiller's influence supplied the main impulse." 
 This connection with a genius higher than his own (a fact 
 graciously acknowledged by himself) has consecrated him. 
 
 "It was his 'inexhaustible cheerfulness,' this blessing of a 
 sanguine and yet not impatient temperament, that more truly 
 than his intellectual ability was the secret of his success. It was 
 this that upheld him in the midst of trials under which men of 
 far higher natural powers have often fallen. It was this that 
 enabled him to withstand the innumerable cares and temptations 
 that beset the paths of the man of letters. The irregularity of 
 his work neither drove him to dissipation nor reduced him to 
 impotence. Even in his rare intervals of enforced and tedious 
 leisure he did not allow himself to despair altogether of his art. 
 Even under the stress of writing for money he could forget to 
 be mercenary and remain an artist. Undaunted by the indif- 
 ference of the ordinary world and the small apparent effect of 
 things poetical, he retained his high belief in the ultimate value 
 of beauty in thought and word." 
 
 "His life was a kind of fever." ( Far j eon). 
 At the time of his death his power of tragic conception and 
 dramatic execution was at its highest. 
 
 The hectic afflatus of the actively tuberculous creative genius 
 is almost incessant and he is nearly always astonishingly prolific. 
 The inspiration of the non-phthisical genius is intermittent, his 
 work is more deliberate, he does not burn the candle at both 
 ends, he is normal and works sanely. The wheels are not con- 
 tinually in motion. 
 
 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. — At the age of nineteen 
 (July, 1768), Goethe had a severe pulmonary hemorrhage, from 
 which he made a very slow recovery and was thought to be con- 
 sumptive. (Sime). In November, 1830, he suffered another 
 violent hemorrhage. This was a little more than a year before 
 his death, which occurred March 22, 1832. (Lewes.) His only 
 son died in 1830 of a "decline." 
 
 Goethe enjoyed, apparently, 8 exceptionally good health dur- 
 
 8 Goethe probably would come under the fourth type of Norman 
 Bridge's classification. (See his "Tuberculosis.") 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 1 5 
 
 ing the productive period of his career. Curiously enough, when 
 he seemed to have left his own early tuberculosis behind him, 
 he still felt the influence of the disease vicariously, through 
 Schiller, as we have seen. We may rest assured, however, that 
 the "latent" lesion supplied quite a few by-products. 
 
 Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson. — In Stevenson we find a 
 striking example of the spes phthisica. The immediate cause of 
 his death was cerebral apoplexy, but for years he had suffered 
 from tuberculosis and had done his best work during this period 
 of pathology. The occasional notes of despondency in Steven- 
 son's letters from Vailima seem to have coincided with periods of 
 temporary improvement. The literary work that he did at such 
 times was not great, (e. g., "St. Ives.") 
 
 When the disease again gains the upper hand we have "Weir 
 of Hermiston," which promised to be his greatest work, accord- 
 ing to himself and the critics too. He did not live to finish it. 
 Then, when very near the grave, "he was buoyant and happy." 
 ("Letters.") 
 
 Stevenson was an optimist — if ever there was one, and a 
 dreamer, a transcendentalist. He would like to have us believe 
 that "no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids; 
 but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of the brain, with the 
 painted windows and the storied walls." Who can say he was 
 not, at the particular moment that he wrote the above, patholog- 
 ically inspired? The reader will reflect, might not such things 
 be written by one not influenced by the spes phthisica? Yes, 
 but so is it conceivable that "Kubla Khan" might have been 
 written by some one not under the influence of a drug, yet no 
 one questions the relation of drug effects to the character of 
 certain of Coleridge's productions. The latter illustration is 
 quite obvious, our contention relatively subtle. There is, really, as 
 little reason for questioning the tuberculosis factor in the case 
 of Stevenson as for questioning the inspiration of religious 
 feeling with respect to the paintings of Fra Angelico. 
 
 "But it was not only the many delightful qualities of his 
 written work which made Stevenson the best loved writer of his 
 time; even more, perhaps, he was endeared to countless readers 
 by the frank revelation of a most engaging personality, which 
 shines through all his works — of a serene, undaunted cheerful- 
 ness * * *." 
 
 Sidney Lanier. — Our greatest lyric poet since Poe is a per- 
 fect type of the tuberculous genius. He produced nothing of any 
 
l6 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 consequence until after he became afflicted. His work improved 
 as his malady advanced, and his greatest work, "Sunrise," was 
 composed on his death-bed (1881). Making all allowance for 
 natural improvement in technique and for increased intellectual 
 breadth, we cannot summarily dismiss consideration of the 
 phthisical element. It stirred his soul into expression in the 
 beginning and as time passed on became more and more excita- 
 tive. "The fire in the flint showed not until it was struck." 
 
 Early in 1874, Lanier, then greatly wasted, having been 
 tuberculous since January, 1868, 9 a period of six years, wrote to 
 his wife : "So many great ideas for art are born to me each day, 
 I am swept away into the land of All-Delight by their strenuous 
 sweet whirlwind ; and I find within myself such entire, yet hum- 
 ble, confidence of possessing every single element of power to 
 carry them all out, * * * I do not understand this." 
 
 Lanier's mother died of tuberculosis. 
 
 No tuberculous genius has, himself, so well expressed the 
 psychology of the tuberculous. Thus, in 1873, he writes to his 
 wife from Texas : "Were it not for some circumstances which 
 make such a proposition seem absurd in the highest degree, I 
 would think that I am shortly to die, and that my spirit hath 
 been singing its swan-song before dissolution. All day my soul 
 hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, 
 unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody. 
 The very inner spirit and essence of all wind-songs, sex-songs, 
 soul-songs and body-songs hath blown upon me in quick gusts 
 like the breath of passion, 10 and sailed me into a sea of vast 
 dreams, whereof each wave is at once a vision and a melody." 
 
 Pathological, of course. This man's children were badly 
 off for the necessaries when he wrote the lines just quoted, yet 
 he was in the seventh heaven. 
 
 Later he wrote again to his wife: "Know, then, that 
 disappointments were inevitable, and will still come until I have 
 
 9 There are reasons for believing that his tuberculosis dated from 1865. 
 
 10 Compare Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" (see Shelley sketch) : 
 
 "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: 
 
 What if my leaves are falling like its own! 
 The tumult of its mighty harmonies 
 
 Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, 
 Sweet though in sadness. Be though, spirit fierce, 
 My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one! 
 
 Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
 Like withered leaves to_ quicken a new birth; 
 
 And, by the incantation of this verse, 
 Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
 
 Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! 
 Be through my lips to unawakened earth 
 The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind, 
 
 If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 17 
 
 fought the battle which every great [sic] artist has had to fight 
 since time began. This — dimly felt while I was doubtful of my 
 own vocation and powers — is clear as the sun to me now that I 
 know, through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and 
 shall be in life and utterance, a great poet." 
 
 Clearly written in a pathologically exalted frame of mind. 
 To ascribe such utterances to any other cause would be unchari- 
 table. One must have something besides genius in him to 
 write so, even to one's wife. 
 
 These exalted ideas were not limited to his poetry. In 1873 
 he wrote to his father: "Several persons, from whose judgment 
 there can be no appeal, have told me * * * that I am the 
 greatest flute-player in the world; * * *." 
 
 He compares himself with Schubert and Schumann in music 
 and with Keats in poetry. Swinburne was presumably inferior: 
 "He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no 
 food therein save pepper and salt." Of William Morris he said : 
 "He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and 
 persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of 
 smile." Again : "Whitman is poetry's butcher. Huge raw collops 
 slashed from the rump of poetry, and never mind gristle — is what 
 Whitman feeds our souls with." And the trouble with Poe was, 
 he did not know enough. "He needed to know a good many 
 more things in order to be a great poet." 
 
 The foregoing quotations are too evidently odious compari- 
 sons with a certain member of the poet's guild ; and all of them 
 show pathological exaltation. Remember that he wrote these 
 things; they were not verbal quips. 
 
 "Sunrise," the last completed poem, written in December, 
 1880, when the poet was rapidly approaching his end, was com- 
 posed at a time when he was running a temperature of 104 . 
 It is considered "the culminating poem, the highest vision of 
 Sidney Lanier." He was then unable to lift his hand and was 
 being fed by his attendants. 
 
 "What he left behind him was written with his life-blood. 
 High above all the evils of the world he lived in a realm of ideal 
 serenity," writes William Hayes Ward. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson. — The father of Emerson died at 
 forty-two of "a consuming marasmus," vainly combated for 
 some months. Ralph Waldo himself was a slender, delicate 
 youth (Hill). He was not vigorous in body as a schoolboy 
 (Loring). There was a family tendency to "chest-disease." 
 
I?, ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 (James Elliott Cabot, p. 219, vol. I, "A Memoir of R. W. E.") 
 A study of Emerson's portraits reveals certain stigmata of the 
 phthisical habit: narrow chest, sloping shoulders, small thorax. 
 Although nearly six feet in height he weighed only about 140 
 pounds when fully matured and in his best health. He is 
 described as being somewhat stooped, or round-shouldered. We 
 may infer that the prominence of the alse scapulae described by 
 all clinicians from Hippocrates downward as one of the stigmata 
 of tuberculosis was partly responsible for this. Throughout his 
 life his health was precarious and even at his best he was 
 "oppressed by a feeling of physical insufficiency." 
 
 Thirty was the critical age with all the Emerson brothers. 
 Ralph Waldo's health breaking in 1826, he spent the winter and 
 spring of 1826-7 in the Southern States. His health had not 
 permitted him to take the regular course at the Theological 
 School in 1823 and he had been merely "approbated to preach." 
 
 One of Emerson's biographers tells us that as a boy he was 
 never seen to run. The brothers Edward and Charles both died 
 at about the age of thirty. 
 
 In 1 83 1 Emerson's first wife died of consumption and he 
 again found himself broken in health. He spent seven months 
 of 1833 in Europe with apparent recovery. 
 
 There is some suggestive correspondence belonging to the 
 1826-7 period. "It would give me great pleasure to be well," 
 he writes in September, 1826. He was then too weak to take 
 any exercise. To William Emerson he writes on January 6, 
 1827, from Charleston, S. C. : 
 
 "I have but a single complaint, a certain stricture on the 
 right side of the chest, which always makes itself felt when the 
 air is cold or damp, and the attempt to preach, or the like exertion 
 of the lungs, is followed by an aching." 
 
 From Alexandria, D. C, he writes to his aunt on May 15, 
 1827: 
 
 "I am waiting here in pleasant durance until the sun will 
 let me go home. For I am too delicate a body to brave the 
 northeast winds with impunity. If I told you I had got well, 
 I believe I deceived you and myself. For I am not sure I am a 
 jot better or worse than when I left home in November ; only in 
 this, that I preached Sunday morning in Washington without 
 any pain or inconvenience. I am still saddled with the demon 
 stricture, and perhaps he will ride me to death. I have not lost 
 my courage, or the possession of my thoughts. * * *" 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 19 
 
 To William he writes again, this time from Boston, under 
 date of June 24, 1827 : 
 
 "I am all clay, no iron. I meditate, now and then, total 
 abdication of the profession, on the score of ill health. It is 
 now the evening of the second Sunday that I have officiated all 
 day at Chauncey Place. Told them this day I won't preach next 
 Sunday, on that account. Very sorry — for how to get my bread ? 
 Shall I commence author. Of prose or of verse? Alack, of 
 both the unwilling Muse. Yet am I no whit the worse in 
 appearance, I believe, than when in New York, but the lungs in 
 their spiteful lobes sing sexton and sorrow whenever I only ask 
 them to shout a sermon for me. * * *" 
 
 Still later he writes to William from Cambridge, August 31, 
 1827: 
 
 "I am going to preach at Northampton for Mr. Hall, a few 
 weeks. His church is a small one, and I shall be able to preach 
 all day, I suppose, without inconvenience. * * * I am not 
 so well but that the cold may make another Southern winter 
 expedient." 
 
 December 14, 1827 : "* * * My health quite the same 
 stupid riddle it has been." 
 
 February 8, 1828: "* * * I am living cautiously; 
 yea, treading on eggs, to strengthen my constitution. It is a 
 long battle, this of mine betwixt life and death, and it is wholly 
 uncertain to whom the game belongs. * * *" 
 
 April 30, 1828 : "* * * Am said to look less like a 
 monument and more like a man. * * * Especially I court 
 laughing persons, and after a merry or only a gossiping hour, 
 when the talk has been mere soap-bubbles, I have lost all sense 
 of the mouse in my chest * * *." 
 
 He was not subjected to any formal examination by the 
 ministerial council which "approbated" him to preach. He once 
 said that he would not have been able to qualify had an exami- 
 nation been held. It may be that the council was merciful, 
 believing that the young man had not long to live and work. 
 Here we may say that Emerson never acquitted himself well in 
 any kind of college work. In mathematics he was a self-con- 
 fessed "dunce." He knew literature, however, as hardly any 
 other man had ever been known to know it before. We may 
 look equally to his semi-invalidism as to his temperament and 
 bent of mind for an explanation of these things. 
 
 The insanity of his brother Edward appears to have been 
 
20 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 of the tuberculous type first noted by Esquirol and later dis- 
 cussed by Mickle in his Gulstonian lectures. Baldwin, McCarthy 
 and Clouston also recognize such a type. It occurred in the 
 course of his "decline." He recovered from it (the insanity) but 
 continued to decline and died a few years afterward of con- 
 sumption. 
 
 The question naturally suggests itself: how much of 
 Emerson's intense and characteristic optimism 11 was patholog- 
 ical? Apparently paradoxical, the idea of pathological optimism 
 is conceivable in Emerson's case — pathological, of course, in 
 respect of toxinic influence, since optimism, per se, is, of course, 
 never associated with the idea of abnormality. Even if unjusti- 
 fied in point of fact, we applaud it almost always as a splendid 
 human trait in a world of trouble. There were periods in 
 Emerson's life when, sorely tried by poverty, by his own illnesses, 
 and by the Nemesis of disease which hung over his whole family, 
 he had about as much reason to be pessimistic as any man ever 
 had, yet we find but slight evidence of anything in all his life 
 save almost transcendental cheerfulness and hope. Once, when 
 his brother lost his reason, do we find him voicing doubt in a 
 letter to his aunt. Again, in his journal, he speaks of his peev- 
 ishness and poor spirit. We must, of course, take into account 
 his fundamental temperament, his mental equipment and educa- 
 tion and his singularly beautiful home training in estimating 
 these things. Yet we cannot ignore his phthisical habit in the 
 light of Cohnheim and Osier's understanding of that condition. 
 This hypotrophy, as Jaccoud calls it, or abionergy, to use Solis- 
 Cohen's term, must first be reckoned with in studying his early 
 life; then, later, account must be taken of the actual bacillary 
 stage that supervened in 1826. The micrococcal stage, or true 
 consumption, he never reached. 
 
 Emerson's tremendous influence upon modern thought and 
 life has been most adequately stated by President Eliot. 
 
 Honor e de Balzac. — The greatest of novelists died of neph- 
 ritis. There was a cardiac complication which two physicians pro- 
 nounced hypertrophy in 1849. After his death, another physi- 
 cian, who had been friend and medical adviser for many years, 
 when asked to give a statement as to the causes thereof, named 
 "a longstanding disease of the heart complicated by marked 
 albuminuria" (Dr. Nacquart). 
 
 However, if one reads the "Letters," he will find much to 
 
 11 Acquiescence and optimism constituted his whole philosophy. So he 
 declared in a letter to Carlyle. 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 21 
 
 more than justify the suspicion that this creator of 2,000 
 characters, 50 volumes, and of at least 325 separate and titled 
 creations (424?) also suffered from tuberculosis. 
 
 The heart disease is described as "simple" hypertrophy. 
 Probably it was secondary to the nephritis. Aneurism is also 
 mentioned. Arteriosclerosis suggests itself in this connection. 
 The heart lesion probably accounts for the long duration of the 
 pulmonary affection, in accordance with well known clinical facts. 
 
 Gould, in his brilliant "Biographic Clinics," has shown very 
 convincingly the influence exerted by eyestrain upon Balzac's 
 literary life and pathological history. The data which the letters 
 provide for Gould's masterly analysis are almost equalled in 
 suggestiveness by similar data bearing upon the topic of tubercu- 
 losis. Here the author's inductive method is practically Gould's 
 method. 
 
 Balzac once wrote : "When I was quite a young man I had 
 an illness from which persons do not recover ; nineteen out of 
 twenty die." We can only infer what this illness may have been, 
 but the remark almost irresistibly suggests tuberculosis. As a 
 boy he was thin and puny. At fourteen he had an illness 
 characterized by feverish symptoms which clung to him 
 persistently. 
 
 "The doctor wants me to travel for two months" (1834). 
 
 "My cold is precisely the same" (1835). 
 
 "I have fever every day" (1835). 
 
 "I am a prey to the horrible spasmodic cough I had at 
 Geneva, and which, since then, returns every year at the same 
 time. Dr. Nacquart declares that I ought to pay attention to it, 
 and that I got something which he does not define, in crossing 
 the Jura. The good doctor is going to study my lungs. This 
 year I suffer more than usual" (1836). 
 
 "My health is extremely bad" (1836). 
 
 "Physical strength is beginning to fail me" (1836). 
 
 "My forces are being exhausted in this struggle ; it is lasting 
 too long; it is wearing me out" (1836). 
 
 "* * * A nervous sanguineous ( !) attack. I was at 
 death's door for a whole day" (1836). 
 
 "All the mucous membranes are violently inflamed" (1836). 
 
 "I entered the garret where I am with the conviction that 
 I should die exhausted with my work" (1836). 
 
 "I am ordered to go to Touraine for a month to recover 
 life, and health" (1836). 
 
22 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 "I must submit to physicians, humbly, or I shall quickly be 
 destroyed" (1836). 
 
 "Touraine has given me back some health" (1836). 
 
 "Then, after getting over that semi-ridiculous illness 
 ("cholerine"), I was seized by the grippe, which kept me ten 
 days in bed" (1837). 
 
 "This illness has made me lose six irreparable weeks" 
 
 (1837). 
 
 "I ended by getting an inflammation of the lungs, and I 
 
 came to Touraine by order of the doctor, who advised me not to 
 
 work, but to amuse myself, and walk about. * * * As for 
 
 working, that is impossible; even the writing of these few lines 
 
 has given me an intolerable pain in the back between the 
 
 shoulders ; and, as for walking, that is still more impossible ; for 
 
 I cough so agedly that I fear to check the perspiration it causes 
 
 by passing from warm to cool spots and breezy openings. I 
 
 thought Touraine would do me good. But my illness has 
 
 increased. The whole left lung is involved, and I return to 
 
 Paris to submit to a fresh examination" (1837). 
 
 "None but myself know the good Switzerland does" (1837). 
 
 "The moment the publication of the last part of the 'Etudes 
 de Moeurs' was over, my strength suddenly collapsed * * * 
 and I foresee it will be so every fourth or fifth month. My health 
 is detestable, disquieting; but I tell this only to you" (1837). 
 
 "* * * if there is success, success will come too late. 
 I feel myself decidedly ill. I should have done better to go and 
 pass six months at Wierzschovnia than to stay on the battlefield 
 where I shall end being knocked over" (1837). 
 
 "Such fevers * * * crush me" (1838). 
 
 "My situation is more painful than it has ever been. 
 Doctor Nacquart preaches vehemently a journey of six weeks" 
 (1840). 
 
 "Nacquart said to me brutally yesterday, while writing his 
 prescription, 'You will die.' 'No,' I said, T have a private 
 god of my own; a god stronger than all diseases'" (1844) 
 (Here speaks the spes phthisica.) 
 
 "I feel young, full of energy * * * before new diffi- 
 culties" (1846). 
 
 "I should have been dressed differently and so escaped my 
 cold" (1846). 
 
 "I took cold at Kiev, which has made me suffer long and 
 cruelly. The treatment I have been undergoing for my heart 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 23 
 
 and lung trouble is uninterrupted. * * * I have reached the 
 stage of absolute muscular weakness in those two organs, which 
 causes suffocation for no cause at all. * * * However, this 
 last cold is getting better, and they are going to try and remedy 
 the muscular exhaustion — otherwise, the journey home would 
 be very difficult. I have had to get a valet — being unable to lift 
 a package, or to make any movement at all violent" (1849). 
 
 "I am as thin as I was in 1819; * * *" (1849). 
 
 "I took the most dreadful cold I have had in my life" 
 (1850). (The letters record colds, colds, colds, and grippes, 
 grippes, grippes, over a period of twenty years.) 
 
 "I have had a serious relapse in my heart trouble and also 
 in the lung" (1850). Obiit August 17, 1850, at the age of 
 fifty-one. 
 
 Yet the patient retained hopes of himself, we are told by 
 Dr. Nacquart. Victor Hugo declares that even a month before 
 his death he was perfectly confident about his recovery, and was 
 gay and full of laughter. 
 
 He projected herculean labors when nearly dead. The 
 day before he died he is said to have pleaded with his physician 
 to keep him alive for six weeks longer, in order that he might 
 finish his work. "Six weeks with fever," he said, "is an eternity. 
 Hours are like days * * * and then the nights are not lost" 
 (Houssaye). 
 
 Gautier dilates upon his extraordinary optimism in respect 
 of his disease. ("Portraits Contemporains — Honor e de Balzac") 
 
 "His vivacity and hopefulness never forsook him for long. 
 Even in his terrible state of health in 1849 and in spite of his 
 disappointment at the non-appearance of 'Le Faiseur/ he was 
 in buoyant spirits" (Sandars). 
 
 Jane Austen. — "The insidious consumption which carried 
 her off seemed only to increase the powers of her mind; she 
 wrote while she could hold pen or pencil, and the day before 
 her death composed stanzas instinct with fancy and vigour." 
 Died July 18, 181 7. 
 
 Edward Fitzgerald styled her "perfect." "There are in the 
 world no compositions which approach nearer to perfection" 
 (Macaulay). "Approached nearest to Shakespeare in character- 
 drawing" (Macaulay — Pollock). Goldwin Smith classes her 
 among the great creative minds. 
 
 Samuel Butler. — The author of "Hudibras" died of tuber- 
 culosis September 25, 1680. The first part of his famous work 
 
24 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 was written at some time between 1648 and 1663, the second 
 part about 1664, and the third part about 1678. It is probable 
 that the type of pulmonary tuberculosis from which he suffered 
 was that which occurs at or near middle age and pursues a very 
 slow, chronic course. "He was of a sanguine temperament." 
 Butler was fifty before he became famous and was sixty-nine 
 at the time of his death. He was the Byron of his age, in point 
 of merited popularity. 
 
 Edward Gibbon. — The author of the "Decline and Fall" 
 impresses upon us in his "Autobiography" (pp. 36-1 12-219) 
 that as a boy he exhibited "a tendency to the consumptive habit." 
 "I have never known the insolence of active and vigorous health." 
 "The progress of my education was * * * often interrupted 
 by disease." His body bore many evidences of the lancet, he 
 tells us, mementoes of his boyhood "tendency." (Tuberculous 
 adenitis, the writer presumes.) 
 
 Francis Beaumont. — Beaumont and Fletcher were the "great 
 Twin Brethren" of the Jacobean drama. Beaumont was born 
 in 1584 and died in 1616, his life spanning a bare thirty-two years. 
 Here was a productive genius indeed. Drayton ascribed an 
 elder brother's death to a too fiery brain or overwrought body. 
 Dyce quotes Bishop Corbet as singing of Francis: 
 
 "So dearly hast thou bought thy precious lines; 
 Their praise grew swiftly, as thy life declines. 
 Beaumont is dead, by whose sole death appears, 
 Wit's a disease consumes men in few years." 
 
 This "passionate and fiery genius" died of a "decline," the 
 old writers tell us. "Decline" is good Old English for tubercu- 
 losis. It was good enough terminology even for the medical 
 lights of that day. 
 
 Jean Frangois Marie Arouet de Voltaire. — What was the 
 disease that afflicted the wonderful scamp who made such a 
 tremendous impression upon the society of his own and all later 
 days — mostly for good, the disease which made of him "a spectre, 
 with the odour of an embalmed corpse"? 
 
 Nowhere in the mass of Voltairean literature which the 
 author has scanned has he found any specific and definitive pro- 
 nouncement as to what his malady really was. Certain data, 
 however, permit the inference of tuberculosis. So, at least, it 
 would seem to the writer, who, however, may be considered 
 biased in the premises. 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 2$ 
 
 We know these things, however. First, that he was a puny, 
 marasmic infant, the child of a delicate mother who died when 
 he was seven years of age; that he was nine months old before 
 he could be publicly baptized ; that he was sickly throughout his 
 long life and of wretched constitution (Espinasse), and that he 
 had a pulmonary hemorrhage on February 25, 1778. He himself 
 bears ample testimony to his miserable health, as in the letter 
 quoted by Lord Brougham, when he speaks of his "crazy consti- 
 tution:" It was Mme. de Staal-Delaunay who harshly character- 
 ized him in the words quoted at the beginning of this biographic 
 clinic. Again, we read that "his constitution, at all times 
 sufficiently robust to sustain the most active labors of the mind, 
 was yet too delicate to bear any other sort of excess." Doctor 
 Burney described him as follows : "It is not easy to conceive 
 it possible for life to subsist in a form so nearly composed of 
 mere skin and bone." Voltaire remarked to Burney that he ) 
 Voltaire, supposed the doctor was anxious to form an idea of 
 the figure of one walking after death. Yet "his eyes and whole 
 countenance were still full of fire; and though so emaciated, a 
 more lively expression cannot be imagined." 
 
 When he was twenty-four the Duchess of Berry described 
 him as "that wicked mummy"; and Sainte-Beuve tells us about 
 his "fleshless grin." His portraits speak volumes to the clinician. 
 
 Baruch Spinoza. — The famous Spinoza was for many years 
 of his life a victim of tuberculosis and he died of it on February 
 
 21, 1677. 
 
 He has had perhaps the most pervasive influence of any 
 modern philosopher except Kant. "Not only metaphysicians, 
 but poets such as Goethe, Wordsworth and Shelley, have gone 
 to him for inspiration, and the essence of his thought has been 
 in large part appropriated in the poetic pantheism of modern 
 interpretations of nature." 
 
 The salient features of his temperament were those which 
 we associate with the spes phthisica. 
 
 Georges Maurice de Guerin. — This true and rare genius 
 lived but twenty-eight years. He was a French Keats, in a 
 sense. Sainte-Beuve said of him : "No French poet * * * 
 has rendered so well the feeling for nature." 
 
 Matthew Arnold remarks that "his expression has, * * * 
 more than Keat's, something mystic, inward, and profound." 
 
 Arnold continues, and the passage is very significant for us : 
 "In him, as in Keats, * * * the temperament, the talent 
 
26 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 itself, is deeply influenced by their mysterious malady; the 
 temperament is devouring; it uses vital power too hard and too 
 fast, paying the penalty in long hours of unutterable exhaustion 
 and in premature death." 
 
 "The germs of destruction and premature death which were 
 sown in the core of his organism, in the roots of life, were 
 frequently transferred to his moral nature * * *" (Sainte- 
 Beuve). 
 
 David Gray. — Gray died at the early age of twenty-three. 
 He was an exceedingly precocious child. "In the Shadows" 
 were sonnets composed during the latter part of his illness. 
 "They possess, these sonnets, a touching and solemn beauty. 
 * * * His poems possess the distinct individuality of true 
 genius. * * * They give evidence of an underlying wealth 
 of imagination and sentiment, of a true and vigorous power of 
 conception, and of a gift of clear and strong, yet subtle and 
 tender, musical utterance." 
 
 Henri Frederic Amiel. — This "curious projection into reality 
 of the Shakespearean Hamlet" died of "heart disease, complicated 
 by disease of the larynx" (Laryngeal phthisis). "He suffered 
 much and long." The last seven years of his life was a physical 
 martyrdom. The ''Journal intime" contains many suggestive 
 passages. 
 
 "For the secret of Amiel's malady is sublime, and the 
 expression of it wonderful," writes his friend Scherer. 
 
 His mother died when thirty, his father at not much more 
 than that age. As a boy he was delicate. He was sensitive and 
 impressionable, but was not thought precocious. Through 
 practically his whole life his health was "low." 
 
 On September n, 1873, he writes in the "Journal" at 
 Amsterdam, whither he had gone in search of health, about 
 his fever, his wasting, and his throat. All are worse. Then 
 he alludes to his eager hopefulness springing up afresh after all 
 disappointments, yet unwarranted by the experience which his 
 reason tells him is invariably unfavorable. 
 
 January 2, 1875. — "Could I be more fragile. * * * I 
 know that the ground is slipping from under me and that the 
 defence of my health is already a hopeless task." 
 
 July 12, 1876. — "Trouble on trouble. My cough has been 
 worse than ever. * * * The process of demolition seems 
 more rapid." 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 27 
 
 April 19, 1881. — "A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh 
 and my heart fail me." 
 
 Here the life and the record terminate. 
 
 Marie Bashkirtseff. — "One of the most individual characters 
 in the literary annals of the Nineteenth Century," Marie Bash- 
 kirtseff, died of consumption at the age of twenty-four. The 
 paintings which she left show great promise, but the "Journal" 
 is unparalleled in literature (Gladstone). The disease was 
 present throughout her active intellectual life, for she had 
 contracted it as a child from a governess. 
 
 At seventeen she writes that it is art alone that keeps her 
 alive. 
 
 May not the "intellectual ' eroticism" which disfigures the 
 suppressed portion of the "Journal" be the psychological equiv- 
 alent of the factitious sexual stimulation so often observed in 
 the tuberculous? 
 
 Washington Irving. — "The most successful writer of the 
 New World" was a delicate boy and showed no inclination to 
 study, being "a dreamer and a saunterer." This was attributed 
 to "a hereditary tendency to pulmonary disease." In 1804 he 
 manifested symptoms of incipient phthisis and spent two years 
 in France, Italy, England and the Netherlands. He returned 
 "in improved health." 
 
 John R. Green. — The author of the "Short History of the 
 English People," and of its later expansion, the "History of the 
 English People," was afflicted by tuberculosis in 1869. During 
 the five years immediately following he wrote the "Short 
 History." The later work was published in 1878-80. Green 
 died in 1883, aged forty-six. As a historian he possessed 
 "brilliant and extraordinary imaginative power," in the sense 
 that "he threw himself into the life of the distant past and made 
 it live again in his pages." 
 
 Richard Baxter. — "Once started as an author, Baxter 
 literally poured out book after book — great folios, thick quartos, 
 crammed duodecimos, pamphlets, tractates, sheets, half-sheets, 
 and broadsides." Orme's list, also Grosart's, shows 168 distinct 
 books. The great Presbyterian divine "was an extraordinary 
 man. In his physique naturally weak, and tainted from the 
 outset with consumptive tendencies (continued ill-health, marked 
 by violent cough and spitting of blood), * * * he so conquered 
 the body that he did the work of a score of ordinary men as an 
 author alone. Baxter had beyond all dispute a penetrative, 
 
28 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 almost morbidly acute brain. He was the creator of our popular 
 Christian literature." 
 
 The portrait in the National Gallery shows a face and figure 
 reminding one somewhat of the wasted Stevenson of Saint- 
 Gaudens's medallion and Sargent's canvas. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte ("Currer Bell"). — All of the Bronte sisters 
 died of tuberculosis. The brother, Branwell, also died of the 
 same disease. 
 
 The girls appear to have been of the precocious type which 
 we associate with the rather characteristic physical delicacy that 
 so often, in the young, denotes a tendency to tuberculosis. 
 
 Maria died in her twelfth, Elizabeth in her eleventh year. 
 Branwell died in his thirty-first year, Emily at the same age. 
 Ann succumbed in her twenty-ninth year. Charlotte died on 
 March 31, 1855, aged thirty-eight. (In private life Mrs. A. B. 
 Nicholls). 
 
 Here we have a remarkable instance of an entire family 
 afflicted by the disease and three sisters who reached adult life 
 displaying extraordinary intellectual faculties. 
 
 Critics are somewhat divided as to who was the ablest, some 
 favoring Emily ("Ellis Bell"). She possessed a powerful and 
 fantastic imagination. The world's verdict, of course, has been 
 in favor of the author of "Jane Eyre" — and the world is usually 
 right. Ann ("Acton Bell") is ranked third. 
 
 Matthew Arnold declared that for passion, vehemence, and 
 grief, Emily had had no equal since Byron. Charlotte possessed 
 a great insight into character, a fiery imagination, and "an 
 extraordinary, indeed astonishing, power of expressing passion, 
 with an equal power of giving reality to her pictures which 
 transfigures the commonest scenes and events in the light of 
 genius." 
 
 What figures, real or imaginative, could be more pathetic 
 than the fragile little Bronte children, dedicated from birth to 
 the great white plague. Think of them in their lonely walks 
 over the great moors which stretched about their father's gloomy 
 rectory, with absolutely no companions and no childish joys. 
 Yet what a victory did they snatch from their death, as they 
 wasted and wore away. Where is the sting of such a death? 
 Whose the real victory? "Give me thy body," says Tuberculosis 
 to Genius, "and I will give thee Immortality, an immortality 
 more sure than any promised by the theologians. Thou shalt 
 be enshrined forever in posterity's heart and brain. Thou must, 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 29 
 
 in any case, later or sooner, die of some disease or hurt. What 
 matters it physically whether it be tuberculosis at thirty-eight 
 or apoplexy at seventy-eight? What it matters intellectually is 
 of an import indeed tremendous. Shall such an exchange be 
 rated unfair to thee or to mankind? And mankind must be 
 afflicted if thou art to be infected. Ah, well, mankind must pay 
 well for its highest genius. Too dearly, say'st thou? Nay, not 
 so. 'Upon such sacrifices the gods themselves throw incense.' " 
 
 Jean Jacques Rousseau. — There is some obscurity as to just 
 what caused the death of Rousseau. Morley inclines to the 
 suicide theory. 
 
 "He was born dying, and though he survived this first crisis 
 by the affectionate care of one of his father's sisters, yet his 
 constitution remained infirm, sickly, and disordered." 
 
 He refers in the "Confessions" to the ill-health of his youth. 
 
 In 1733, when about twenty-one years of age, Rousseau's 
 health began to show signs of a complete breakdown. He 
 became very weak, suffered from palpitation and shortness of 
 breath, and had pulmonary hemorrhages. He suffered from a 
 slow feverishness, from which he never afterward became en- 
 tirely free. "His mind," says Morley, "was as feverish as his 
 body," a suggestive comment, indeed. 
 
 John Ruskin. — "The writer of the Victorian era who poured 
 forth the greatest mass of literature upon the greatest variety 
 of subjects" possessed an "organization of abnormal delicacy." 
 At sixteen he had a sharp attack of pleurisy. At twenty-one, 
 while at Oxford, he had an alarming hemorrhage from the 
 lungs. His University career was thus suddenly broken. "For 
 nearly two years he was dragged about from place to place, and 
 from doctor to doctor, in search of health." He had a series 
 of "fevers" while in Italy and the Alps. Immediately upon his 
 marriage his pulmonary disease again became alarmingly mani- 
 fest (April 10, 1848). He remained invalided until August. 
 
 Ruskin wrote more than eighty distinct works upon subjects 
 comprising "Mountains, Rivers and Lakes ; about Cathedrals and 
 Landscapes; about Geology; about Minerals, Architecture, 
 Painting, Sculpture, Music, Drawing, Political Economy, Edu- 
 cation, Poetry, Literature, History, Mythology, Socialism, 
 Theology, Morals." He was indeed "a brilliant and noble 
 genius * * * who in the English-speaking world left the 
 most direct and visible imprint of his thoughts." 
 
 "Modern Painters" and "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" 
 
30 ARTHUR C. JAC0BS0N. 
 
 belong to the period of his active tuberculosis and inaugurated 
 the long list of his epoch-making works. 
 
 Charles Kingsley. — We read in Mrs. Kingsley's work of 
 the repeated "breakdowns" of Canon Kingsley. In 1849, at 
 thirty, he was in ill-health. In 1864-5, at the time of the 
 Newman controversy, his health again became precarious. He 
 goes to the continent with Froude. At Denver, Colorado, in 
 1874, he has an attack of pleurisy; in 1874-5, he is " a shrunken 
 figure." On November 30, 1874, he contracts a "cold," develops 
 a bronchitic cough, and takes to bed December 28. Repeated 
 hemorrhages occur, and on January 23, 1875, he finally succumbs. 
 
 Robert Southey. — Southey suffered from a "nervous fever" 
 in 1800-1. A year in Portugal "restored his health." He was 
 then twenty-six. "Thalaba, the Destroyer," was finished during 
 this period. Although his health is alleged to have been restored 
 in 1 80 1, Eldridge's drawing in the National Portrait Gallery, 
 made in 1804, shows a delicate appearing man. The same may 
 be said of Phillips' and of Hancock's portraits. 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne. — At the age of nine Hawthorne met 
 with an accident. A ball struck him upon the foot and he was 
 severely lamed. He was kept at home for a long time and had 
 not completely recovered before his twelfth year. 
 
 Pickard says : "Nathaniel received an injury to his foot 
 when eight or nine years of age, and was obliged to use crutches 
 for a time. He later had an illness which compelled him to 
 resume his crutches." 
 
 His sister Elizabeth tells us that "his foot pined away and 
 was considerably smaller than the other. He had every doctor 
 that could be heard of * * * he went upon two crutches. 
 Everybody thought that, if he lived, he would be always lame. 
 
 * * * It was during his long lameness that he acquired his 
 habit of constant reading. Undoubtedly he would have wanted 
 many of the qualities which distinguished him in after life, if 
 his genius had not been thus shielded in childhood." 
 
 Here, very evidently, is an example of localized, joint 
 tuberculosis. The injury was the exciting cause acting with 
 and upon a predisposing one. This is the usual history in such 
 cases. 
 
 Like Scott, this "most eminent representative of a literature, 
 
 * * * the most valuable example of the American genius," 
 "became a vigorous, ruddy-faced, broad-shouldered, handsome 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 31 
 
 man." Open air life on the family farm at Sebago Lake, Maine, 
 saved him. 
 
 The description of his last days, as given by Julian Haw- 
 thorne and Mrs. Lathrop, is quite suggestive. He was taken to 
 see Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in March, 1864. He was led 
 to think that the visit was purely social, but Holmes had been 
 asked to give the family some idea of Hawthorne's condition, 
 which was giving the family great concern. Holmes thought 
 him to be suffering from "a gradual wasting or consumption of 
 the bodily organs." This is not Oslerian diagnosis, but it was 
 probably the most that Holmes could tactfully determine without 
 defeating the family's idea of not apprising Hawthorne of the 
 visit's real object. 
 
 Robert Pollok. — At the age of twenty-eight, just as he was 
 becoming justly famous, Pollok died of pulmonary tuberculosis. 
 He is considered to have shown marked force and originality, 
 and "The Course of Time," for so young a man, was "a vast 
 achievement." 
 
 Michael Bruce. — Bruce died of phthisis at the early age of 
 twenty-one. The "Elegy" was written in the spring of 1767, 
 "with death full in his view." 
 
 "Oft morning dreams presage approaching fate; 
 And morning dreams, as poets tell, are true. 
 Led by pale ghosts, I enter Death's dark gate, 
 And bid the realms of light and life adieu." u 
 
 Hannah More. — At all periods of her life Mrs. More had 
 been liable to a chronic affection of the chest, accompanied with 
 fever. Her strength, she herself said, was all superinduced; 
 "none of it is natural to me." 
 
 Of herself she observed that "she never felt so sensible 
 to the majesty and beauty of the Psalms, or so capable and 
 desirous of writing a commentary upon them, as when upon a 
 sick-bed." And "Bishop Porteus, whenever he heard she was 
 confined to her bed by sickness, always said he looked for a new 
 book from her." 
 
 Pierre Jean de Beranger. — "The Burns of France" tells us 
 in his "Memoirs" that in 1801 his constitution was very feeble. 
 "No one believed that, pale and meagre as I was, I should ever 
 attain to my thirtieth year. My chest appeared to be in a very 
 
 11 The reader will observe a suggestive parallelism between these 
 words of Bruce and certain of Shakespeare's "Sonnets" (see the Shake- 
 speare study which follows). 
 
32 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 bad condition, and my father was constantly repeating to me, 
 'You have not long to live, I shall bury you soon.' Neither of 
 us was affected at such a prospect." (They were all but starv- 
 ing in a garret.) 
 
 Beranger had been a sickly child. When he became famous, 
 in 1813, he was thirty-three and in wretched health. 
 
 So great was the popularity of the national song-writer of 
 France that it has been said of him that "he was the only poet 
 of modern times who could altogether have dispensed with 
 printing" — for "one man sang his songs to another over all the 
 land of France." 
 
 Torn Dutt. — This exotic flower of genius died at the age 
 of twenty-one. The last four years of the life of the high-caste 
 Hindu poetess were spent in the old garden house at Calcutta, "in 
 a feverish dream of intellectual effort and imaginative produc- 
 tion." 
 
 "When we consider," says Gosse in his "Memoir," "what 
 she achieved in the last forty-five months of her life, it is impos- 
 sible to wonder that the frail and hectic body succumbed under 
 so excessive a strain." 
 
 William Ellery Channing. — Channing's life tends to parallel 
 Emerson's in its physical aspect as it does in its intellectual. 
 
 The brother Francis dies in 1810 of tuberculosis. William 
 Ellery himself spends the years 1822-3 in Europe because of 
 wretched health. He is now forty-two. The father had died 
 young (in 1793, aged thirty-six), leaving a widow and a large 
 family. William Ellery is afflicted most of his life by a chronic 
 debility accompanied with fever. William H. Channing, in the 
 "Memoirs," alludes to "the wasted form, thin features and sunken 
 eyes of the preacher, whose spirit seemed about to cast aside the 
 body." Upon his dying bed the man's intellectual processes are 
 exalted, recalling those of Lanier. 
 
 The portraits of Washington Allston and of Gambardella 
 reveal the phthisical physiognomy. 
 
 Immanuel Kant. — Kant was of weak frame. He was barely 
 five feet in height. His chest was concave, the right shoulder 
 drawn downward — characteristic evidences of fibroid phthisis. 
 In consequence of his contracted chest he suffered from respi- 
 ratory oppression. When writing the "Kritik," in 1771, his 
 health was seriously impaired; later, it is unceasingly broken. 
 Only by the most systematic living and assiduous care was he 
 able to keep body and soul together. He had, he said, overcome 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 33 
 
 a tendency to cough. His force of thought was remarkable 
 enough to account for this. It will be recalled in this connection 
 that at the age of seventy he wrote an essay "On the Power of 
 the Mind to Master the Feeling of Illness by Force of 
 Resolution." His life was certainly one long demonstration of 
 the above theorem. 
 
 Madame de Stael. — She whom Lamartine characterized as 
 "the last of the Romans under this Csesar (Napoleon), who 
 dared not destroy her, and could not abase her," died of "a 
 general declension of her constitution." Portal's brochure on 
 her "Malady and Death" does not edify one very much. 12 Her 
 illness was a long one, attended by fever and wasting. Chateau- 
 briand records that "an ardent fever animated her cheeks." "Her 
 features were kindled with an animation which made a strong 
 contrast with her feeble condition" (George Tichnor). Fler 
 brilliant intellect was vivacious to the last. She would come 
 home exhausted from evening gatherings where she had been 
 more brilliant than ever. 
 
 Thus the clinical picture as presented by her biographers 
 suggests tuberculosis and nothing else. 
 
 "Thomas Ingoldsby' 3 (Richard Harris Barham). — The 
 author of the "Ingoldsby Legends" was "endowed with a san- 
 guine temperament and an indefatigable power of work." 
 
 The "Legends" were published collectively in 1840. The 
 first one had appeared in 1837. Barham died in 1845 after a 
 long illness, the description of which in his "Life and Letters" 
 is a good account of the clinical characteristics of laryngeal 
 phthisis. 
 
 Six of his nine children died during his lifetime. 
 
 James Ryder Randall. — The song which Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes characterized as the greatest war song of any nation, 
 "Maryland, My Maryland," was written by Randall at the age 
 of twenty-two. Shortly before this he had gone into a "decline" 
 and had been forced to leave Baltimore and find a refuge farther 
 south, in Louisiana. 
 
 * * * Some powerful influence seemed to possess 
 me, and almost involuntarily I proceeded to write the song of 
 'My Maryland.' 
 
 "I remember that this idea seemed to take shape as music 
 in my brain — some wild air that I cannot now recall. The whole 
 
 Friedlander, too, made no diagnosis. 
 
34 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 poem was dashed off rapidly when once begun. It was not com- 
 posed in cold blood, but under what may be called a conflagra- 
 tion of the senses, if not an inspiration of the intellect. No one 
 was more surprised than I was at the widespread and instan- 
 taneous popularity of the song I had been so strangely stimulated 
 to write." 
 
 Nikolai Vassilyevitch Gogol. — The father of modern Rus- 
 sian realism was afflicted about 1837. The first volume of "Dead 
 Souls" was published in 1842. Gogol died at the age of forty- 
 three. He was one of the greatest of Russian writers. 
 
 Fyodor Mikhdylovitch Dostoyevski. — Dostoyevski died in 
 1881 of "lung trouble." "His power of psychological analysis, 
 * * * especially of pathological conditions, aided as he was in 
 this by his complete self-identification with the * * * char- 
 acters depicted, has nothing similar in all the range of universal 
 literature." 
 
 Shakespeare. — As might be supposed, naught but the flim- 
 siest data exist bearing upon the medical history of Shakespeare 
 and his kin. He would be presumptuous indeed who should 
 pretend to contort such data into alleged definitiveness. ISlo 
 sophistry, however, shall be invoked to convert what the writer 
 considers merely suggestive into the golden glow of a factitious 
 vraisemblance. Such a task were more worthy of the literary 
 metaphysicians who live in that intellectual country wherein 
 prevail the chilling blasts of Baconian "brain-storms." 
 
 Taine, like many other commentators, considers that 
 Shakespeare reveals himself in many places, particularly in the 
 "Sonnets." "Look now. Do you not see the poet behind the 
 crowd of his creations? They have heralded his approach; 
 they have all shown somewhat of him." 
 
 "We pause stupefied," Taine continues, "before these con- 
 vulsive metaphors, which might have been written by a fevered 
 hand in a night's delirium, * * *." 
 
 "Ah, wherefore with infection should he live, 
 
 And with his presence grace impiety, 
 That sin by him advantage should achieve, 
 
 And lace itself with his society: 
 Why should false painting imitate his cheek, 
 
 And steal dead seeing of his inward hue? 
 Why should poor beauty indirectly seek 
 
 Roses of shadow, since his rose is true? 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 35 
 
 Why should he live, now Nature bankrupt is, 
 Beggar'd of blood to blush through lively veins? 
 
 For she hath no exchequer now but his, 
 And, proud of many, lives upon his gains. 
 
 0, him she stores, to show what wealth she had 
 
 In days long since, before these last so bad. 
 
 "Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn, 
 
 When beauty liv'd and died as flowers do now, 
 Before these bastard signs of fair were borne, 
 
 Or durst inhabit on a living brow; 
 Before the golden tresses of the dead, 
 
 The right of sepulchres, were shorn away, 
 To live a second life on second head; 
 
 Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay: 
 In him those holy antique hours are seen, 
 
 Without all ornament, itself, and true, 
 Making no summer of another's green, 
 
 Robbing no old to dress his beauty new; 
 And him as for a map doth Nature store, 
 To show false Art what beauty was of yore. 
 
 "That time of year thou mayst in me behold 
 
 When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang 
 Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, 
 
 Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 
 In me thou seest the twilight of such day 
 
 As after sunset fadeth in the west; 
 Which by and by black night doth take away, 
 
 Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. 
 In me thou seest the glowing of such fire, 
 
 That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, 
 As the death-bed whereon it must expire, 
 
 Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. 
 This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, 
 To love that well which thou must leave ere long. 
 
 "No longer mourn for me when I am dead, 
 
 Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell 
 Give warning to the world that I am fled 
 
 From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell: 
 Nay, if you read this line, remember not 
 
 The hand that writ it; for I love you so, 
 That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, 
 
 If thinking on me then should make you woe. 
 Or, if (I say) you look upon this verse, 
 
 When I perhaps compounded am with clay, 
 Do not so much as my poor name rehearse; 
 
 But let your love even with my life decay; 
 Lest the wise world should look into your moan, 
 And mock you with me after I am gone." 
 
36 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 As to time of writing, the "Sonnets" date from 1597- 
 1603. In the former year Shakespeare was about thirty-three 
 years old. Some of the sonnets have been said by competent 
 critics "to relate to critical circumstances in Shakespeare's life, 
 of which we know no more than that they must have occurred 
 before 1599." They are unquestionably self-revelatory, these 
 sonnets, though the allusions are veiled. They were written in 
 his youth, thought Coleridge, who, with Wordsworth, believed 
 in their autobiographical character. The latter emphatically 
 declares them to express Shakespeare's "own feelings in his own 
 person." 
 
 "* * * in some respects the most interesting of Shakes- 
 peare's writings [the 'Sonnets'], as they tell us most about 
 himself." (Garnett and Gosse.) 
 
 Says Gerald Massey, in his interpretative book on the 
 "Sonnets" : "These sonnets have the authority of parting words ; 
 for they were written when Shakespeare was ill, as I understand 
 him. * * * This is a group (Sonnets 63, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 
 74, 81) of very touching sonnets. Nowhere else shall we draw 
 more near to the poet in his own person. They look as if written 
 in contemplation of death. They have a touch of physical 
 languor; the tinge of solemn thought." 
 
 "Shakespeare died of a fevour * * *." (From Memo- 
 randa of Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford-on-Avon in 1662.) 
 He was comparatively idle during the four years and a half that 
 intervened between the writing of the "Tempest" in 161 1 
 and his death. 13 Halliwell-Phillips thinks that he may have 
 written two or three plays, among them "Henry the Eighth," 
 after the performance above alluded to. An active literary career 
 abandoned at the age of forty-seven! He had ceased to act 
 about 1604, or twelve years before his death, being then only 
 forty! His will was prepared in January, 1616, and signed in 
 March, which commentators believe to indicate that he had been 
 in poor health for some time before his death on April 23 of that 
 year. Moreover, we may infer that the visit of Ben Jonson and 
 Drayton to New Place, shortly before his taking to bed, was in 
 the nature of a leave-taking. 
 
 Why the delay in signing the will? Did he still have hopes 
 of recovery? 
 
 13 "Now my charms are all overthrown, 
 And what strength I have's mine own; 
 Which is most faint:" — Epilogue, Tempest. 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 37 
 
 "A remarkable phenomenon attends Shakespeare's later 
 dramatic work. This is his constant endeavor to diminish the 
 labours of composition. In every play known with certainty to 
 have belonged to his later period, 'A Winter's Tale' alone 
 excepted, recourse is had to some device tending to save trouble 
 to the author. * * * The labour-saving tendency * * * 
 is undeniable." "Some portions of 'Henry the Eighth' indicate 
 beyond dispute the authorship of Fletcher * * *.'*' 
 
 The portrait on the title-page of the First Folio edition of 
 Shakespeare (British Museum; copied from the original in oils 
 of 1609) reveals a poor physique. Aubrey, it is true, called him 
 "a well-shap't man." 
 
 The bust on Shakespeare's tomb is not the original bust 
 described in Sir William Dugdale's "History of the Antiquities 
 of Warwickshire," prepared about 1638. Instead of the "heavy, 
 stupid looking man" portrayed in the present bust we see an 
 individual with hollow cheeks. 
 
 Shakespeare's daughter Susanna died at the age of twenty- 
 four, his son Hamnet at the age of eleven. His sister Margaret 
 lived one year, his sister Ann eight years. The brother Richard 
 died in his thirty-ninth year, the brother Edmond in his twenty- 
 seventh year. None of his three grandchildren by his daughter 
 Judith reached the age of twenty. The Shakespeare lineage 
 became extinct in 1670, fifty-four years after the death of the 
 poet. 
 
 Did we surely know that Shakespeare was one of the world's 
 great consumptives, a chapter would be added to the evidence 
 bearing upon the Baconian "controversy" that to the writer's 
 mind would be strongly indicative of the authorship of the 
 immortal works of the greatest creative mind of all time, for 
 Bacon's well known history furnishes no suggestion that he 
 suffered from such a disease as tuberculosis. What tuberculous 
 genius ever possessed an "extraordinarily unemotional mind," 
 an "insensibility to emotional sensibilities," "a certain deadness 
 towards exalted moral sentiment"? Did such traits characterize 
 the man whom Ben Jonson addressed as "Sweet Swan of Avon" ? 
 
 III. 
 
 While only a few literary stars of the first magnitude have 
 been discussed in this study, the writer believes that they furnish 
 a more suggestive series than would a small army of lesser 
 
38 ARTHUR C. JACOBSON. 
 
 literary lights. Therefore he has omitted from the study such 
 types as Hurrell Froude, Richard Lovelace, George Herbert, 
 John Addingtonj Symonds, Westcott (the author of "David 
 Harum"), "Artemus Ward," Maxim Gorky, Adelaide Ann 
 Procter, Joseph Rodman Drake, Kirke White, E. P. Roe, N. P. 
 Willis, George Ripley, Grace Aguilar, Stephen Crane, H. C. 
 Bunner, John Sterling, Henry Timrod, Paul Laurence Dunbar, 
 the historian Harris, Joel T. Headley, Blackmore, etc. Were 
 these included we would be descending from the high realm 
 of genius to the comparatively commonplace domain of talent, 
 and while this would also serve our purpose in no small degree, 
 it would result in what the writer suspects very few people ever 
 read through, an apparently formidable treatise. 
 
 The author submits that the subjects whom he has studied 
 comprise an extraordinarily significant galaxy of creative 
 thinkers. Of special, peculiar and far-reaching import are 
 their messages to mankind, taken in the aggregate. 
 
 That tuberculosis tends to occasion, in its vicitms, "peculiar 
 characteristics, incompatible with success and useful labors," is 
 a belief held by certain medical observers and philosophers. 
 There is, of course, a large measure of truth in such a belief, for 
 the shortening of life alone would, apparently, make for the 
 cancelling of usefulness. Yet, if we take a large view of all 
 cognate facts bearing upon the matter, we must conclude that 
 the subject does not end here. Judging such facts in the Emer- 
 sonian spirit, what a debt we owe to the many splendid characters 
 who have been the victims of this disease! Does not this 
 partially offset the economic loss? The tuberculous genius may 
 have been useless from the standpoint of "Diamond Jim" Brady 
 or of "Oily John," but 
 
 "From his dead lips a clearer note is born 
 Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn" ! 
 
 We may concede that tuberculosis does tend to unfit its 
 victims for the material things of life, but we must, if we would 
 strike a balance of truth, place over against this the fact that, 
 in numberless instances, it has acted as a most potential factor 
 in the excitation of certain minds of extraordinary intellectual 
 endowment to more energetic output, the quality of which output 
 has been distinctly enhanced. If it tends to unfit its victims for 
 material success, so also does it tend to quicken and to inspire 
 the intellect — a divine compensation. We may then, with truth ; 
 
TUBERCULOSIS AND THE CREATIVE MIND. 39 
 
 regard it as a "toad, ugly and venomous, which wears yet a 
 precious jewel in his head." 
 
 "There is a dread disease which so prepares its victim, as it 
 were, for death; which so refines it of its grosser aspect, and 
 throws around familiar looks unearthly indications of the coming 
 change — a dread disease, in which the struggle between soul 
 and body is so gradual, quiet, and solemn, and the result so 
 sure, that day by day, and grain by grain, the mortal part wastes 
 and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine 
 with its lightening load, and, feeling immortality at hand, deems 
 it but a new term of mortal life — a disease in which death and 
 life are so strangely blended, that death takes the glow and 
 hue of life, and life the gaunt and grisly form of death — a disease 
 which medicine never cured, wealth warded off, or poverty could 
 boast exemption from — which sometimes moves in giant strides, 
 and sometimes at a tardy sluggish pace, but, slow or quick, is 
 ever sure and certain." 14 
 
 It is not alone the strenuous — in the ordinary, vulgar sense, 
 who achieve great things. Not always is the race to the physi- 
 cally swift, the battle to the bodily strong. Above these, soaring 
 toward the goal of human greatness, is an intellectual vanguard 
 whose bodies are so weak, whose minds are so finely organized 
 and so subtly stimulated, whose hold upon physical life is so 
 feeble, that it is given to them, in superior degree, to soar upon 
 the wings of fancy into other worlds where all is beauty and 
 "the air is music, there to write down the cadences that they 
 hear. And these cadences, though imperfect, become the songs 
 and the literary gospel of the nations." Men of common clay 
 are but "the pans and the barrows or the porters of the fire" ; 
 our tuberculous geniuses "are children of the fire itself, made of 
 it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three 
 removes." 
 
 14 "Nicholas Nickleby," Chapter 49, paragraph 3. 
 
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