Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis [Hardcover]

Deb Hayden (Author), Deborah Hayden (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0465028810 | ISBN-13: 978-0465028818 | Publication Date: January 7, 2003 | Edition: export ed

Was Beethoven experiencing syphilitic euphoria when he composed "Ode to Joy"? Did van Gogh paint "Crows Over the Wheatfield" in a fit of diseased madness right before he shot himself? Was syphilis a stowaway on Columbus's return voyage to Europe? The answers to these provocative questions are likely "yes," claims Deborah Hayden in this riveting investigation of the effects of the "Pox" on the lives and works of world figures from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries. Writing with remarkable insight and narrative flair, Hayden argues that biographers and historians have vastly underestimated the influence of what Thomas Mann called "this exhilarating yet wasting disease." Shrouded in secrecy, syphilis was accompanied by wild euphoria and suicidal depression, megalomania and paranoia, profoundly affecting sufferers' worldview, their sexual behavior and personality, and, of course, their art. Deeply informed and courageously argued, Pox has already been heralded as a major contribution to our understanding of genius, madness, and creativity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Were Abraham and Mary Lincoln's well-known health problems symptoms of syphilis? Was Adolf Hitler's final descent into madness due to an early syphilitic infection acquired from a prostitute? Did James Joyce make hidden allusions to his own infection in works like Ulysses? According to Hayden, a California-based scholar and marketing executive, scholars and medical professionals have too often overlooked the evidence of "pox," or syphilis-often called the "Great Imitator" because its symptoms mimic those of many other diseases-in the biographies of historical figures. Few would argue that some of Hayden's subjects, like Flaubert and Karen Blixen (subject of the movie Out of Africa), suffered from the disease. Her arguments for others, like the Lincolns and Beethoven, are sure to provoke debate. Hayden pulls together fascinating medical histories for figures like President Lincoln and Hitler, but with Mary Lincoln in particular her background documentation seems spotty. She overlooks Mary's vigorous, and very sane, campaign to be released from the mental institution that her son Robert had her committed to. Hayden suffers from an unfortunate tendency to romanticize the final stages of syphilis: she claims repeatedly that artists attain some sort of mystical breakthrough in their art when they're on the verge of paralytic collapse, an assertion straight out of Thomas Mann and other early 20th-century writers. The sprawling chapter on Hitler is the climax of the book but suffers from poor organization and loose writing. Readers will be divided on whether or not they are convinced by Hayden's arguments, but with the reemergence of syphilis in many urban populations, the subject is sure to attract attention.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New England Journal of Medicine

Deborah Hayden's Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis is the biography of an infection that has fascinated and frustrated clinicians for more than half a millennium. The book is a repository of all that had been forgotten about a sinister bacterium and the disease that was its legacy. It is also a compendium of what Hayden refers to as the "veiled revelation" of syphilis that can be found in the intimate details of the lives of famous people if one searches with sufficient determination and vigor. Most of all, the book provides fodder for the imagination. Envision a book, written by the owner of a direct-marketing firm, about the history, microbiology, pathogenesis, clinical manifestations, diagnosis, and treatment of one of humankind's most enigmatic disorders. The author has no formal medical training but has gleaned sufficient expertise in syphilology from lavishly illustrated 19th-century and early-20th-century medical books "written in language remarkably accessible to the layperson" to qualify her to lecture clinicians and peer-reviewed medical journals about what she calls "faulty assumptions about a disease no longer familiar in clinical practice." Imagine that same authority examining the case histories of scores of illustrious personalities through "the selective lens of a possible diagnosis of syphilis" and, time and again, finding evidence of the one disease she knows in depth. Imagine a concept that Hayden calls "creative euphoria," whereby "the syphilitic was often rewarded, in a kind of Faustian bargain for enduring the pain and despair, by . . . electrified, joyous energy when grandiosity led to new vision." Beethoven had it. Guy de Maupassant did too. In fact, Hayden says that "Maupassant's literary leap from mediocrity in 1876 to the supreme mastery of the short story in 1880 might have been the result of a tremendous stimulation of the brain cells" by what biographer Robert Sherard refers to as "myriads of spiral-shaped germs darting to and fro." Because Vincent van Gogh committed suicide, says Hayden, we do not know whether he experienced "the ecstasy and the misery of the stage that precedes paresis when he painted with such intensity in the last months of his life." One must wonder whether Michelangelo's agony and ecstasy represent another example of creative euphoria. Friedrich Nietzsche's syphilis has yet to be confirmed under "the selective lens of presumptive diagnosis," says Hayden. However, the books about syphilis that Hayden relied on to write Pox tell us, she says, "that the last expressions of sanity before paretic dementia sets in can be characterized by mystical vision, messianic prophecy, grandiose self-definition, clarity of expression, and extreme disinhibition, while all the time maintaining exquisite precision of form." Could one ask for a better description of Nietzsche's later works? Oscar Wilde seems to have been denied the benefit of syphilitic euphoria, most likely, Hayden says, because it was "effectively doused by a liter of brandy a day." But not Karen Blixen, who wrote Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, and Out of Africa under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. Syphilis, she maintained, sold her soul to the devil for the ability to tell stories. Now imagine a pale, fragile bacterium that can dictate why great people do what they do, thereby determining the course of world events. That bacterium may have caused Flaubert to become a writer instead of a lawyer and Hitler to accelerate his war effort beyond reason at the end, for fear that his heart might at any moment balloon with a fatal luetic aneurysm. Finally, imagine a book dedicated to bringing syphilis in from the wings of biography, a book in which evidence obtained from fourthhand accounts, legend, and works of fiction is piled so high on the side of the great pox that even a negative Wassermann test cannot tip the balance in favor of some other disorder. Imagine how difficult it must be to diagnose in a patient a disease other than the "Great Imitator" if it is the only disease you know. For if your foremost assets as a self-made syphilologist are zeal, passion, and persistence in the pursuit of an illness that defies diagnosis at every stage, you are bound to find syphilis wherever you look: in Baudelaire, Schubert, Schumann, Joyce, Columbus, Daudet, Poe, Gaugin, Churchill (Randolph), Al Capone, Ivan the Terrible, Manet, Idi Amin, Darwin, Donizetti, Dostoyevsky, Lenin, Meriwether Lewis, Mozart, Robert Mugabe, Napoleon, Paganini, Rabelais, Stalin, Tolstoy, and Woodrow Wilson. You will see it in any idiosyncracy -- Mary Todd Lincoln's shopping compulsion and Honest Abe's melancholia and hypochondriasis -- and in any poor, departed soul whose death has generated even a hint of diagnostic confusion. If you can imagine those things, then you have an idea of what awaits you in Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis. Exotic flowers of speculation bloom luxuriantly here. If Oscar Wilde was correct when he said that "history is merely gossip," then Pox is history at its best. Philip A. Mackowiak, M.D.
Copyright © 2003 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; export ed edition (January 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465028810
• ISBN-13: 978-0465028818
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,295,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Relevant for today, March 23, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis (Hardcover)

This is a brilliant analysis of the course of a debilitating disease and its influence on its sufferers and, in some cases, world history. By correcting the ignorance of science and medicine (to say nothing of rational thought) that plagues much historical writing and literary criticism, this book illuminates aspects of the acts and works of many pre-penicillin "celebrities".

More significant, however, is what this book implies in terms of public affairs in the current day. One must ask if there are major public figures in this age of modern medicine whose bizarre behavior may be the product of undetected and untreated syphilitic disease. The author herself places such figures as Joseph Stalin and Idi Amin in this category, but what of Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, and Saddam Hussein, to name a few? How many tyrants and madmen of the recent past and present are affected by neurosyphlis? How many will flame forth to scar the world in the future?

The book ends with the application of penicillin; however, if primary and secondary syphilis are not appropriately treated (and in some cases, even when they are) there intervenes a long period of smoldering dormancy in which the disease cannot reliably be detected serologically (by Wasserman and more modern tests). The idea that a major political figure could today be a long-term syphilitic is entirely possible, especially given the lack of education modern physicians from all nations receive in the diagnosis and management of the long-term characteristics of the disease.

Think about it...

And read the book.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Syphilis, March 3, 2003

By 

R.T. Ravenholt, MD (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis (Hardcover)

In POX, Deborah Hayden presents the most thoroughly researched, best balanced, most lucid and convincing account of luminary syphilitic devastation that I recall reading during a half-century career in epidemiology. Hayden's incisive historical examination of the powerful role of syphilis in shaping the lives and works of fifteen pre-penicillin lminaries, points the need and way for analogous examination of thousands of other historical events and figures actually scourged by syphilis; but which -- without the syphilis key -- have remained largely inexplicable.

To the American syphilis casualty list of historic figures has been added the tragic death of Meriwether Lewis, whose suicide on the Natchez Trace in 1809, because of paresis and looming madness due to syphilis acquired in the line of duty on a dangerous mission for his President and country, was an act of ultimate courage, shielding himself, other Expedition principals and family from syphilitic disgrace (Epidemiology May 1994).

Many analagous historical enigmas await the research of talented researchers like Deborah Hayden, to lift the veil of time and acquaint current generations with the horrific depredations of syphilis before penicillin.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Repetitious But Interesting, July 28, 2005

By 

Timothy Haugh (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis (Hardcover)

Until the mid-twentieth century, when it was shown that penicillin was an effective treatment, syphilis was one of the most common diseases in Europe and North America. Though the point is still debated, it seems likely that syphilis was the one epidemic Native Americans were able to give to their conquerors in the face of smallpox, measles and the rest that devastated their populations. Unlike the European diseases, however, which were quickly and disproportionately deadly, syphilis, after its sudden and sweeping introduction, quickly mutated into a chronic illness. Though ultimately fatal in some cases, syphilis often allowed carriers to live for many decades after the initial infection, slowly tearing the body apart. It is the story of this disease that has become largely ignored in modern scholarship that Ms. Hayden tells in Pox.

There is much of interest in this book, particularly in the first section. Here, Ms. Hayden recounts what is known of the introduction of syphilis into Europe, including a lively discussion indicating that Columbus himself may have been among the first syphilitics. Even more interesting is her description of the disease itself from the signs of initial infection to the often gradual, extensive and painful deterioration that accompanies the progress of the disease ending in madness and death. She notes that there are two key problems in an analysis of syphilis: the fact that syphilis is "the great imitator" (meaning that its extensive symptoms are often easily mistaken for other diseases, especially as these symptoms may occur decades after the initial infection) and the fact that patients admitting to syphilis was rare because of the social stigma attached. So understanding the full impact of syphilis on Western culture is problematic. And here is where the book becomes less compelling.

The last two sections of the book take us through the biographies of some important syphilitics like the Lincolns (Abraham & Mary Todd), Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche, Beethoven and van Gogh. If they are syphilitics. In many cases it's not known for sure though Ms. Hayden attempts to make the case. And, proved or not, she attempts to show how syphilis--if that's what it was--would have had important impact on their lives and work. Her most extensive and controversial case surrounds that of Adolf Hitler as having been infected as a young man (possibly by a Jewish prostitute) and how the last years of World War II saw his deterioration.

The problems with these biographies are two-fold. First, is the simple matter of the difficulty in writing something interesting about each person. These biographies are extraordinarily repetitious: infection and illness, latency and then steadily worsening heath problems as the spirochetes take over. Second, they are filled with so much speculation. Even in the rare case where syphilis is a known infection, as Ms. Hayden admits, there is no guarantee that the following health problems are syphilitic in nature. They might be. All of this speculation begins to make the reader wonder if this is all fact or fiction.

Still, Ms. Hayden often makes a compelling if not entirely convincing case. Certainly, she makes the case that it is a subject that deserves more interest, especially from biographers of these various subjects. There is no doubt that illness can have a great impact on a person's life, art and politics and Ms. Hayden deserves credit for bringing this important disease back to light.