Analyzing Artists and Their Ailments

In the declining years of German composer Ludwig van Beethoven, his deafness was increasing and he probably could hear only about 25% of what he was creating, some scholars say.

Because of painter Claude Monet’s cataracts in later life, a noticeable difference may be seen in his depictions then of the gardens at Giverny and what he had painted when he had good eyesight.

Such subjects are discussed once a month, in a library at UCLA, before a standing-room-only audience of about 40 physicians and lay people. The most unusual seminars are presented free by faculty doctors and deal with the works of artists who were affected by their afflictions, and how artists in general have perceived medicine and physicians.

Late this afternoon, for instance, while those in attendance munch cookies and sip sherry, the host, Dr. Peter Chopivsky, will deal with “Monet’s Gardens and His Cataracts.”

Modified by Blindness

It will concern how the later works of the Impressionist French painter were modified by the fact that he was almost blind in his last 10 years.

“As you trace his art, you can see the effect of the growing cataracts on his perception of the gardens, which were actually the backyard of his villa,” Chopivsky said in an interview. “The gardens seem more and more as if you were looking at them through a fog.”

Harking back to other lectures, the doctor mentioned the Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom he said suffered many infections and probably died of kidney failure.

“Probably as a child he had several episodes of strep throat. The streptococcus germ can travel to the heart and other organs,” said Chopivsky, assistant professor of family medicine at the UCLA Medical Center and originator of the lecture series. “Many times, Mozart canceled appearances because of illnesses.

“By the time he was commissioned by a nobleman to compose a Requiem Mass, he may have been suffering so much that he knew his time was up. Here was a 35-year-old man facing the prospect of his own imminent death (he died before completing the piece).

“I’m sure his own emotions and thoughts of mortality went into the work.”

The seminars began in October of 1984, with Chopivsky giving the first one entitled: “Writers, Composers and Artists Touched by Tuberculosis.”

Firing Up Creativity

“There is a school of thought--although I don’t subscribe to it--which suggests that something about the disease fires up the creative juices,” the physician said.

“Tuberculosis gives the sufferer repeated cycles of fever and sweats. During those episodes of feverishness, so the thought goes, the artist himself reaches a fever pitch of creativity.”

The professor gave four examples of tuberculosis sufferers: “No sooner had the Russian writer Anton Chekhov graduated from medical school in Moscow, than he began coughing up blood, the start of TB.

“Because of it, he had to spend time recuperating in the Crimea, and it gave him certain insights he wouldn’t have gotten had he stayed in Moscow. The play ‘The Cherry Orchard’ was set in the country and involved the landed gentry.

“Furthermore, with his medical background, in almost all of his plays is a physician. They aren’t exalted--they have affairs, they get drunk, they are human.”

John Keats, the English poet, apprenticed with a surgeon, suffered tuberculosis much of his life and died from it.

“In those of his works in which illness and death are portrayed, not only does he do it with the accuracy of someone trained in medicine,” Chopivsky said, “but one could argue that his own tuberculosis allowed him a greater keenness of observation toward illness, suffering and death.”

Although the English artist Aubrey Beardsley didn’t express it in his work, he also suffered TB and died from it while in his 20s.

The French painter Antoine Watteau had TB, and, the professor said, “I’m sure the way in which he may have been treated by his own physicians may have instilled in his mind how he wanted his paintings to portray them.”

Tunnel Range of Sound

As for Beethoven, that seminar was conducted by Dr. Victor Goodhill, emeritus professor of ear, nose and throat surgery. “By using sound mixes, Goodhill was able to show the audience how the composer--as he became progressively deaf--was hearing less and less of what he was composing,” Chopivsky said. “He was unable to hear such sounds as extremely high pitch or low pitch, and was restricted to a tunnel range of sounds. Beethoven heard his music in his brain cells rather than his ears.”

The German composer Johann Sebastian Bach eventually developed cataracts. “In those days, a doctor didn’t need a license or formal medical school training, and some of them traveled from country to country,” the UCLA physician explained.

“One such man from England, John Taylor, performed on Bach an operation known as couching, which pushes the cataract back into the eye, rather than removing it. The surgery was performed twice. Soon thereafter Bach suffered a stroke, possibly as a result of the surgery, and died shortly after the second operation.”

Another example of a famous artist interacting with the medical profession is the English composer George Handel. He had the same surgery as Bach, at the hands of the same traveling physician, with the same unsuccessful result.

Mentioned, of course, during the seminar on “Failed Physicians, Successful Writers” was the quote by Chekhov: “Medicine is my wife, but literature is my mistress.”

Other doctors or would-be doctors more remembered for what they did with a pen, Chopivsky pointed out, were William Carlos Williams, Oliver Wendell Holmes (father of the U. S. Supreme Court justice), Robert Louis Stevenson (another tuberculosis sufferer, who studied medicine, but never got the degree), and W. Somerset Maugham.

“ ‘Of Human Bondage’ by Maugham is required reading for almost any medical student,” the seminar leader said. “It describes as well as anything ever written the long hours, the tedious classes, the catch-as-catch-can meals, the lack of sleep.”

Observers of Life

One of the UCLA sessions dealt with “Shakespeare’s Medics and Medicine.” “He was a pretty healthy chap,” the professor said, “but scholars have noted 700 references by him to either medicine, physicians or drugs. As an observer of life, he noted not only the pratfalls of kings and commoners, but also of physicians.

“The artist, like the doctor, is an observer of life. Doctors are often too busy or too hassled to pause, to focus on what they are experiencing with their patients. Artists, by their very work, allow themselves that pause.

“Today’s physician is so caught up with the next patient, the next disease. He or she should also be asking: ‘What can I learn about medicine from the great artists?’ ”

“Medicine in the Bible” was another of the seminar topics. “The distances of time, and differences in technology and geology, may make the more than 300 references to medical ailments in the Bible difficult to discern and recognize for modern physicians” Chopivsky said.

He pointed out a few references. “King Herod’s life and death, as portrayed in Acts, provide a vivid example of what was probably parasitic colitis, with subsequent bowel perforation and fulminant peritonitis.

“The Prophet Elijah revived a child by what may have been history’s first recorded case of the Heimlich maneuver--or at least a close facsimile.”

Biblical Treatments

As for pharmacopeia in Biblical times, olive oil was used to dress skin wounds and was applied to bruises and ulcers. Pomegranates were used as anti-parasitics.

What began as a dual interest for Chopivsky in childhood, and continued into his college years, has become an increasingly popular discussion experience at UCLA. The seminars, held in the Lawrence Library on the last Tuesday of each month, are open to the public.

It was almost inevitable that Chopivsky would be involved in such a labor of love.

“My parents both had medical degrees and while I was a child we lived in the small Illinois town of Vermont, population 900,” the 33-year-old Chopivsky recalled. “On my way home from grade school, I would stop in my father’s office.

“While passing through the waiting room, I would see how depressed the patients seemed, and then I would see later how their outlooks had changed. From as far back as the third grade, I knew I wanted to be a physician.”

All the while his parents were exposing him and his siblings to the joys of the arts.

‘Three Hours From Chicago’

“We lived about three hours from Chicago and 2 1/2 hours from St. Louis, so I spent a lot of time reading the great books,” Chopivsky went on. “The neighbors were forever asking Mom: ‘What was Peter’s light doing on at 1 o’clock in the morning?’ ”

After being graduated from Princeton with majors in biology and Slavic studies, he studied at the George Washington University Medical School, where one of the courses he took was “Medicine in Shakespeare.”

That planted the seed. Eighteen months ago, teaching second-year medical students at UCLA how to talk with and examine patients, he was approached after a class by one of the students. “Is there any way we can infuse a sense of humanism into the medical school curriculum?” she asked.

For a long time, such a cure has been available.