Introduction

The aphorism ‘Beware the dreaded spirochaete’ was wise. A spirochaete (Treponema pallidum) causes syphilis, an infection which may manifest itself in many forms. Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, the leading nineteenth- century specialist, described syphilis as ‘the great imitator’, hence the caution in judging case histories preceding the standard blood test. That test (the WR) was an antibody test introduced by Wassermann in 1905, immortalising his name. There can be both false positives and negatives. There are more recent blood tests (e.g. VDRL), which are beyond the scope of this book.

Few diseases have been implicated more often with past composers, reflecting partly the overall incidence and ubiquity of the condition, but also the enthusiasm and sometimes carelessness with which it has been over-diagnosed retrospectively. The lists below show composers who were definitely syphilitic and those alleged by some to have possibly been so.

Known Syphilitics

Some Alleged Syphilitics

Syphilis is so important in musicology that a short digression into the history of this disease and its clinical pathology follows.

A Short History of Syphilis

Traditionally, syphilis first appeared when the French army invaded Naples in 1494. This may explain its soubriquet, the French pox; it is known in France as the Italian pox. The age-old question is whether Columbus's expedition took the disease to the Americas or whether his crew brought it to Europe. Waivers described a physician in Barcelona, Dr Ruiz Diaz de Isla, who had seen Vincente Pinzon, the captain of Columbus's second ship, the Nina, avowing that he had syphilis, curiously a disease supposedly unrecognised previously in Europe. So how did he recognise it?

Rothschild gives a definitive account of the history of syphilis. From a medical, archaeological and anthropological viewpoint, syphilis is easier than many other diseases to study retrospectively because it frequently affects the skeleton. Much is known about this disease from the Oslo study of patients with untreated syphilis over several decades. In 1999, the World Health Organization estimated there to be 12 million cases of syphilis worldwide.