POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis

Excerpt from Dinesen chapter:

Bror Blixen had a mild case of syphilis, and after the initial infection remained healthy until his death in a car crash, with the exception of one relapse in 1924. He had filed for divorce and, while the divorce was pending, went elephant hunting in Uganda. Karen wrote to her brother: “There is little doubt as to what is wrong with him, he himself realizes that it is his old illness; he writes that to start with his whole body became covered with sores, and now he has a kind of inflammation in all his joints, which are quite stiff and swollen, as well as constant high fever and a kind of paralysis.” There were no hospitals, he had no money, and their friends would not want him to be around their children in this condition, so she could think of no other place for him to go except back to her farm, assuming he could be moved. “I cannot let him lie there an die like a dog.” There are stories that Bror traveled with a double cot in his tent because so many of the wives of other hunters wanted to sleep with him. Bror infected and divorced his wife, depleted her finances, and used their house for orgies with the Masai when she was in Europe, the last questioned by Bror supporters who have said that he would have found it beneath his station to consort with the Masai. One detail seems to characterize him above the rest: he used her best crystal for target practice.

By the nineteen-thirties, Blixen’s balance was impaired and she had difficulty walking. Her stomach problems continued, with sudden bouts of vomiting and abdominal pain so severe that at times she sat on the floor howling like an animal. Syphilis texts tell of the extreme gastric pain of tabes. John Stokes wrote: “It is of agonizing intensity, grinding or spasmodic, and soon reduces the average patient to sobbing helplessness.” Twice surgeons severed nerves in her spinal cord to relieve some of the pain. Numerous operations left her “sliced through on all my flanks and edges.” Were all these surgeries necessary? Concerning the gastric pain of tabes, Rudolph Kampmaier wrote that a careless physical examination in cases of abdominal pain may lead to mistaken diagnoses and needless operations. “We have seen one patient who had undergone eight abdominal operations because of tabetic root pain.” John Stokes reported a patient with five abdominal scars for useless surgeries in a case of a tabetic with gastric crises, calling this “unbelievable persistence of error. . . . If emphasis be placed upon the signs of tabes elicited in history and examination, rather than upon the blood serologic reactions and spinal fluid examination, both of which maybe negative, this mistake will almost never happen.”