https://youtu.be/vgVP_BgDzw4
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840)
https://youtu.be/fOsLAF2f7zw?list=PLJMmc7XsWKaBgpP3IACicAjMI2VEJWBEy
Volume 216, 2015, Pages 233–275
Music, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Historical Connections and Perspectives
Chapter 11 – Robert Schumann in the psychiatric hospital at Endenich
Abstract
Robert
Schumann (1810–1856) spent the last two-and-a-half years of his life in
the private psychiatric hospital in Endenich. His medical records
emerged in 1991 and were published by B. R. Appel in 2006. Daily entries
document the treatment typical at that time for what was at first
considered to be “melancholy with delusions”: Shielding from stimuli,
physical procedures, and a dietary regimen. The feared, actual
diagnosis, a “general (incomplete) paralysis,” becomes a certainty in
the course of the paranoid-hallucinatory symptoms with cerebro-organic
characteristics and agitated states, differences in pupil size, and
increasing speech disturbances. In the medicine of the time, syphilis is
just emerging as the suspected cause, and the term “progressive
paralysis” is coined as typical for the course. Proof of the Treponema pallidum
infection and the serologic reaction is not obtained until 1906. People
close to Robert, in particular his wife Clara and the circle of friends
around Brahms and Joachim, cared intensively for him and suffered under
the therapeutic isolation. The medical records and illness-related
letters contradict the theory that Schumann was disposed of by being put
into the psychiatric hospital; they show the concern of all during the
unfavorable illness course.
Keywords
- Robert Schumann;
- Clara Schumann;
- psychiatric disease;
- neurolues;
- paralysis;
- romantic psychiatry
- Corresponding author: Tel.:
+ 49-170-2954552; Fax: +49-89-72406721
- 2
- Medical Director (retired) of the Pfalzklinikum, Klingenmünster, Rheinland Pfalz, Germany
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
