Word: moorman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Moorman - University of Chicago Press...
Despite the mountain air of Parnassus, the nine Muses probably have hacking coughs. Genius and tuberculosis, as critics and physicians have long noted, occur together oftener than coincidence accounts for. Dr. Lewis Jefferson Moorman, onetime dean of the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, takes this thesis for granted, illustrates and defines it in Tuberculosis and Genius this week...
Long-distance autopsies are risky. French Scholar Denis Saurat enraged the high-minded by "demonstrating" that blind John Milton (like deaf Ludwig van Beethoven) suffered from hereditary syphilis. Diagnostician Moorman finds Milton tuberculous. Other famous consumptives: Pope, Dr. Johnson, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Descartes, Balzac, Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Chekhov, Dostoevski, a brow-wrinkling list of other writers and thinkers. Doctors suspect that tuberculosis develops genius because 1) apprehension of death inspires a burning awareness of life's beauty, significance, transience, 2) the bacillus breeds restlessness and an intoxicated hypersensitiveness...