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“Listen carefully to the
patients, and they’ll tell you the diagnosis,”
a medical maxim advises. But what if the
patient’s been dead for a millennium?
The rule still applies, says Philip
Mackowiak, chief of medicine at the
Baltimore V.A. Medical Center. For the
past 15 years Mackowiak has supervised
the ultimate postmortem: a conference
that challenges participants to deduce the
cause of death for historical figures like
Pericles, Columbus, and Mozart. Using
evidence drawn from diaries, historical
records, and contemporary accounts,
presenters perform theoretical autopsies,
which help them refine their ability
to diagnose living patients.
Social history is important to consider.
Beethoven, for instance, never married.
His writings mention prostitutes, and
that supports a disputed diagnosis
of syphilis, which could have caused
his deafness and claimed his life.
The cold cases in the extreme
also humanize the celebrity corpses—sometimes more than we’d like.
Says Faith Fitzgerald, an internist
who dissected Mozart’s medical
history: “We are disquieted when
extraordinary people die from
ordinary things.” —Cathy Newman
Art: Bryan Christie Design
Posted by National Geographic Staff |
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