Notable people identified as possibly syphilitic:

Though diagnoses arrived at in retrospect from purely historical data are always open to question, it has been suggested that the people on this list below may had syphilis.

Background

The determination of whether a person long dead did or did not suffer from syphilis can be fraught with controversy. Even in living patients, diagnosis is not straightforward, since the disease mimics many other illnesses. Among historical figures, the situation is far worse, since modern laboratory testing cannot be carried out.

Author Deborah Hayden recently drew much attention for her book POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis, which offered bold hypotheses about the possibility of syphilis among a wide array of historical figures, some of whom appear on the list below. In addition to speculating about whether these individuals suffered from syphilis, Hayden went further, claiming that in the case of people famed for creative contributions (such as authors and painters), their syphilis somehow was responsible for their heightened artistic abilities.

Not all reaction to Hayden's work has been positive. Notably, Philip A. Mackowiak, an M.D. with extensive experience in the investigation of diseases of historical figures, published a review of Hayden's book in The New England Journal of Medicine, essentially asserting that Hayden was not competent to make the judgments that she tried to make. Mackowiak's primary point is that for any kind of plausible diagnosis of the diseases of historical figures, one must have expertise concerning all of the diseases compatible with their symptoms, and not just one. Whatever expertise Hayden may have had (her prior background is in direct marketing, not medicine), it apparently did not extend beyond knowledge about syphilis.

Thus, many of the names given on the list below must be considered quite speculative. The assessment of the weight of the evidence for purposes of this Wikipedia article is a work in progress, and curious readers may wish to consult the Discussion page for this purpose.

List

Some of these people(*) believed they had syphilis and wrote about it in their diaries or it was otherwise well known by their peers. The list is sorted by birthdate.

• 1431 Pope Alexander VI
• 1451 Christopher Columbus
• 1470 King Charles VIII of France
• 1471 Albrecht Dürer
• 1485 Catherine of Aragon, first Queen consort of Henry VIII
• 1485 Hernán Cortés
• 1491 *King Henry VIII and five of his wives
• 1494 Francis I of France
• c. 1507 Anne Boleyn, second Queen consort of Henry VIII
• c. 1509 Jane Seymour, third Queen consort of Henry VIII
• c. 1512 Catherine Parr, sixth Queen consort of Henry VIII.
• 1516 Mary I of England, known as Bloody Mary (daughter of Henry VIII above)
• 1525 Catherine Howard, fifth Queen consort of Henry VIII
• 1530 Ivan the Terrible
• 1533 Queen Elizabeth I
• 1537 *King Edward VI (son of Henry VIII above)
• 1606 *William Davenant
• 1756 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• 1769 Napoleon I of France
• 1770 Ludwig van Beethoven
• 1774 *Meriwether Lewis
• 1782 Niccolò Paganini
• 1797 *Franz Schubert
• 179 Gaetano Donizetti
• 1797 Heinrich Heine
• 1809 Edgar Allan Poe
• 1809 Charles Darwin
• 1809 Abraham Lincoln
• 1810 *Robert Schumann
• 1818 *Mary Todd Lincoln
• 1821 Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
• 1821 Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• 1821 Gustave Flaubert
• 1828 Leo Tolstoy
• 1832 Edouard Manet
• 1848 Paul Gauguin
• 1849 *Lord Randolph Churchill (father of Winston Churchill)
• 1850 *Guy de Maupassant
• 1853 *Vincent Van Gogh
• 1854 Oscar Wilde
• 1854 Arthur Rimbaud
• 1856 Woodrow Wilson
• 1862 *Georges Feydeau
• 1864 *Toulouse Lautrec
• 1868 *Scott Joplin
• 1870 *Vladimir Lenin
• 1879 Joseph Stalin
• 1882 James Joyce
• 1885 *Isak Dinesen (real name Karen Blixen)
• 1889 Adolf Hitler [1]
• 1891 Henry Miller
• 1899 *Al Capone
• 1909 *Howard Hughes (and many actresses he had contact with)
• 1928 Idi Amin
• 1932-1972 *patients in the Tuskegee syphilis study

References

• Hayden, Deborah (2003) Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis. New York, Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02881-0.
• Mackowiak, Philip A. (2003) Review of Hayden (2003). The New England Journal of Medicine 348:2585-2586. This review is also available on line.

External links

• The Web site affiliated with Deborah Hayden's book is located at http://www.poxhistory.com.