Schumann's Health

Letter to the Editor

© Times Literary Supplement, July 1984 (p. 783)

Sir, - It takes a highly specialized psychiatrist to claim that a man who had a genital lesion and showed classical symptoms of syphilis over the next twenty-five years before dying insane in 1856, was really just suffering from “what we would now call a bi-polar (manic-depressive) affective disorder”. Peter Ostwald (Letters, July 6) offers no reasons or evidence at all for his own opinion. He does not even mention Eliot Slater's medical and psychiatric review of Schumann's illness (Robert Schumann, ed Alan Walker, revised edn 1976, pp 406-17) with its surely very strong arguments for syphi­lis, or the diagnosis from the leading neurolog­ists Drs Henson and Urich (BMJ, April 8, 1978, p 900) of “organic brain disease” by 1854. Whether or how creativity might have been thus affected is certainly debatable; but it is fair to point out that Menuhin's effusive assess­ment of the Violin Concerto (1853) would not have been shared by Brahms or Joachim, who jointly suppressed that work as unworthy.

ERIC SAMS.

32 Arundel Avenue, Sanderstead, Surrey.