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Handel's Ill Health: Documents and Diagnoses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Hunter
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Abstract

The full range of George Frideric Handel's medical problems has not been adequately considered despite numerous specialist articles. Contemporary evidence used by previous writers is combined with new evidence from the correspondence of James Harris and other sources in a lengthy table arranged chronologically. The subsequent discussion focuses on four areas: obesity, binge-eating disorder, paralysis, and blindness. The likelihood that lead poisoning, probably from excessive consumption of wine and rich foods, caused the paralysis and blindness is explored in depth. The testing of bone or hair fragments is the only means of establishing a sure diagnosis, and that would require exhumation.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle , Volume 41 , 2008 , pp. 69 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2008

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References

1 Victor Schœlcher, The Life of Handel (London, 1857), 380; Paul Henry Lang, George Frideric Handel (New York, 1966), 538; Christopher Hogwood, Handel (London, 1984), 229.Google Scholar

2 John Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (London, 1760), 140–1.Google Scholar

3 Johann Mattheson, Georg Friderick Handels Lebensbeschreibung (Hamburg, 1761), a translation and augmentation of Mainwaring's Memoirs. Translated portions appear in Charles Burney, ‘Sketch of a Life of Handel’, in his An Account of the Musical Performances … in Commemoration of Handel (London, 1785; repr. New York, 1979), ∗5. What Mattheson meant by tall is unclear. The most detailed consideration of the height of males in the British Isles is Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980, Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time, 9 (Cambridge, 1990). The average height of upper-class men about 1750 was 67 inches or 172 cm.Google Scholar

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22 According to Roy Baumeister, both binge eating and alcohol abuse are strongly ‘associated with escape from the self’; Escaping the Self: Alcoholism, Spirituality, Masochism, and Other Flights from the Burden of Selfhood (New York, 1991), 165. In this theory, people set unachievably high standards despite fear of failure and pervasive self-doubt. A multi-study review of the psychopathology of obese persons failed to uncover any evidence for the ‘belief that obese persons suffer disproportionately from emotional disturbances’, according to Albert J. Stunkard and Thomas A. Wadden, ‘Psychological Aspects of Human Obesity’, in Obesity, ed. Björntorp and Brodoff, 352–60 (at 353), citing their own study ‘Psychopathology and Obesity’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 499 (1987), 55–65. A more recent review, by M. de Zwaan, of eight studies of obese binge eaters, showed, to the contrary, that subjects were far more likely to present with an affective disorder, typically major depression, than nonbinge-eating control subjects; ‘Binge Eating Disorder and Obesity’, International Journal of Obesity, 25, Suppl. 1 (2001), S51–S55.Google Scholar

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