Tuberculosis and the creative mind / by Arthur C. Jacobson.

  • Jacobson, Arthur C.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Tuberculosis and the creative mind / by Arthur C. Jacobson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    suspect from whose growth scrapings have been taken before he pronounces his judgment. No neurologist could name Cowper's malady, however much he might suspect a mental twist, even after the most careful study of his poems, but, knowing the man's pathetic life struggle with the depression which finally overwhelmed him, its influence upon his writings becomes a self-evident proposition. Dana, in his Nervous Diseases, gives an almost sure recipe for producing a case of paresis. A man of nervous constitution and dissipated habits acquires syphilis between the ages of twenty and thirty. He continues to drink alcohol to excess and to play the game of life hard. In ten or fifteen years he will be pretty sure to have paresis. Similarly, were the present writer to give an almost sure recipe for producing the highest type of the creative mind, he would postulate an initial spark of genius plus tuberculosis. It is natural to think, a priori, that the pathological can account for little in literature or in art except the morbid, the abnormal, the depressed. This is doubtless true in the main, but, a posteriori, we must except tuberculosis. Certain cele- brated victims have been, par excellence, the creators of the highest and best. The layman, unfamiliar with the curious mental trait of consumptives already alluded to, will be apt to reason that such men accomplished great things despite their infirmity, and that had they not been hampered by it, they would have accomplished still greater ones. On the other hand, the physician will find the explanation to lie most readily in that characteristic clinical trait of the tuberculous, the spes phthisical Their lives are shortened, physically, but quickened psychically in a ratio inversely as the shortening. The layman's reasoning is sound in a general sense, fallacious in a particular sense. Relatively abnormal hopefulness, optimism, buoyancy, represent the prevailing5 psychologic phase of tuber- culosis. Out of this closely related trinity, too, grows the factitious physical energy of the victims. Upon his death-bed the consumptive makes plans for twenty years ahead. Far 2 Death catches him like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and his mouth full of boastful language. Some dispositions seem as the disease advances to become so ethereal that they suggest another sphere. 3 States of depression do occasionally occur. (Exemplified by Keats, Stevenson, Schiller.)