March 28
By Linda de
Vries
Sometime between March 28 and March 31 of 1750, Sebastian had
eye surgery. In 1750 Easter Sunday was March 29, so March 28 seems a likely day
for the surgery, although it could have been on the Monday or the Tuesday
following Easter.
Sebastian’s eyesight began to fail in the last years of his
life. In 1749 the Leipzig Council had begun searching for his successor. In
1750, on the advice of friends, he decided to undergo cataract surgery.
He selected a traveling English oculist and eye “surgeon”
named John Taylor, who dubbed himself “Chevalier John Taylor,” suggested that
he had been granted some sort of order of merit. Taylor also claimed the title
of “Opthalmiater Royal,” personal eye surgeon to King George II and the Pope.
Taylor maintained a flamboyant practice. He traveled from
town to town throughout Europe in a coach painted with eyeballs. He sent lackeys
in advance to distribute handbills and gather a crowd in the town square to
observe his surgery. Before each operation he declaimed long speeches in an
idiosyncratic oratorical style. After the surgeries he bandaged the eyes of his
patients, instructed them to keep the covering on for seven days, and then left
town before the bandages were removed! It is reported that he was completely
blind during the last years of his life—poetic justice perhaps.
The writer Samuel Johnson described Taylor’s life and career
as an example of “how far impudence may carry ignorance.” Daniel Albert, the
author of Men of Vision, a history of
ophthalmology, calls Taylor “the poster child for 18th century
quackery.”
The procedure Taylor performed
on Sebastian (and on his fellow-Thuringian-turned-Brit George Frideric Handel)
was called “couching,” an operation dating back to 2000 BCE and still performed
in parts of the world today. It involves poking a needle into the
cataract-clouded lens and pushing it back into the rear of the eye, out of the
field of vision.
As was often the case, the
surgery failed and Sebastian required a second surgery a week later. He
developed a painful post-operative infection, acute secondary glaucoma, which
left him totally blind. He was treated with the most “advanced” practices of
the day—bleeding, enemas, and, says Finnish ophthalmologist Ahti Tarkkanen, eye
drops made from the blood of dead pigeons mixed with either pulverized sugar or
baked salt. For serious inflammation, large doses of mercury were given.
Sebastian spent the last
months of his life in a darkened room, revising his chorale preludes (See March
19). Then, it is reported, he awoke on the morning of July 28, 1750, to find
that he could again see quite clearly. If this return of sight occurred, it was
most likely Charles Bonnet Syndrome, named after a Swiss naturalist who first
described the condition in 1769. It was first accepted in English-speaking
psychiatry in1982. The patient experiences visual hallucinations in which
characters and objects appear smaller than normal. Between 10% and 40% of
elderly patients with vision loss experience Bonnet syndrome, thought to result
from damage to the optic nerve, macular degeneration, or peripheral vision loss
from glaucoma.
Sebastian died later that same
day at 9:15 p.m., most probably from a stroke and not as a direct result of the
eye surgery. (See March 4 for his burial and entombment.)
Ironically, three years
earlier in Paris, ophthalmologist Jacques David conducted the first more modern
and successful cataract surgery.
No comments:
Post a Comment