Genre:

Essay, Biography

Subjects:

Disease, Neurology, Exhibitions, Medical Practitioners, Reading

    Notes that in 1847 the German poet Heinrich Heine 'had a kind of paralytic stroke. His malady proved to be a softening of the spinal marrow: it was incurable: it made rapid progress [...] but his disease took more than eight years to kill him. For nearly eight years he lay helpless on a couch, with the use of his limbs gone, wasted almost to the proportions of a child, wasted so that a woman could carry him about; the sight of one eye lost, that of the other greatly dimmed, and requiring, that it might be exercised, to have the palsied eyelid lifted and held up by the finger; all this, and suffering, besides this, at short intervals, paroxysms of nervous agony' (239). Also cites Heine, 'in 1855, the year of the Great Exhibition in Paris', declaring, 'my nerves are of that quite singularly remarkable miserableness of nature, that I am convinced they would get at the Exhibition the grand medal for pain and misery'. Heine 'read all the medical books which treated of his complaint. "But", said he to someone who found him thus engaged, "what good this reading is to do me I don't know, except that it will qualify me to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth about diseases of the spinal marrow"', at which Arnold comments, 'What a matter of grim seriousness are our own ailments to most of us! yet with this gaiety Heine treated his to the end'. (240)