POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis

Excerpt from van Gogh chapter:

When the Holland Herald assigned journalist Ken Wilkie to write a feature article on Vincent Van Gogh, he began tracing Van Gogh’s steps in the previous century, interviewing descendents of relatives and friends. After the article was published, Wilkie was still bothered by unanswered questions. Why did Vincent’s letters from Antwerp to his brother Theo, beginning in November 1885, express fears of going mad and dying? Why had death suddenly become a theme in his art? The grim "Skull with Cigarette" was a clear departure from previous themes, as was "Skeleton Hanging in a Closet," in which a black cat contemplates a disintegrating skeleton. Wilkie wondered: Did Vincent’s increasingly poor health then have anything to do with this change in his art?

Looking for a place to start, he recalled that biographer Dr. Marc Edo Tralbaut had told him about finding the name ‘Cavenaile’ written on the back of one of Vincent’s sketchbooks along with a notation of a consultation hour. He began there. First, he checked the Antwerp phonebook, and was surprised to find the name Cavenaille (Tralbaut claims to have confirmed that the correct family spelling has two l’s). He was even more surprised when Dr. Amadeus Cavenaille, the grandson of Dr. Hubertus Amadeus Cavenaille, answered his call. When they met, the doctor seated Wilkie in the chair his grandfather had used when interviewing patients; presumably Vincent had occupied the same seat. My grandfather treated Van Gogh several times in 1885, Cavanaille told Wilkie.

And did your grandfather ever tell you, Wilkie asked, what Van Gogh’s complaint was? Cavenaille shocked him with this answer. “He said he treated Van Gogh for syphilis. He prescribed a treatment with mercury and sent him to the Stuyvenberg hospital for hip-baths.” When Vincent pressed him for details, the doctor told him the disease could affect his brain, and be fatal. This consultation, held only a few years after Alfred Fournier’s findings that syphilis led to paresis, shows that by then syphilitic insanity was widely accepted and the information routinely passed on to patients. From that moment on, Vincent would have had reason to fear and anticipate tertiary syphilitic insanity. Vincent paid for the consultation with a portrait which has been lost.

Wilkie returned to Tralbaut’s biography and found that his predecessor knew: “Moreover, Vincent had caught syphilis,” Tralbaut reported as fact, “probably at Antwerp, and this certainly contributed to his physical and mental condition.” Vincent’s Antwerp letters reveal numerous complaints of poor health, periods of fever and faintness, and gastrointestinal problems. He developed a chronic cough accompanied by grayish phlegm. In Wilkie’s copy of Tralbaut’s book, the word “syphilis” was circled and a big “No!” penned in the margin, signed W.V.v G: Vincent Willem Van Gogh, the painter’s nephew. This nephew, when Wilkie interviewed him, vehemently denied the syphilis possibility.