Date: May 3, 2010

Title: Hippocrates Meets Hipparchus

Podcaster: Mick Vagg

Description: Astronomers are people too, and they have had their share of dramatic medical problems. This podcast presents four case histories of famous astronomy figures namely Galileo, Enrico Fermi, Jeremiah Horrocks and George Ellery Hale, and examines whether popular understanding really tallies with our current medical knowledge.

Bio: Dr Michael Vagg is a physician specializing in Rehabilitation Medicine and Pain Management. He lives in Torquay, in the Surfcoast region of Australia. One day he hopes to be able to remember more than five constellations and own a telescope bigger than Galileo’s.

Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Kylie Sturgess and the Token Skeptic podcast, a weekly show about superstition, science, and why we believe – at www.tokenskeptic.org.

Transcript:

Hello ! My name is Dr Michael Vagg and I live in the beautiful Surfcoast region of Southern Australia. I’m going to be talking today about the medical case histories of famous astronomers. There is really no greater name in astronomy than Galileo, who should need no introduction to this audience. The cause of Galileo’s blindness which was complete in both eyes and occurred late in life over a relatively short period has been the subject of a lot of casual speculation among doctors over the centuries since. It’s right up there with Beethoven’s deafness, Dostoevsky’s epilepsy and the cause of Van Gogh’s famous self-harm attempt as subjects of historical speculation.

Was it caused by something really simple and common, such as cataracts or old age? Or was it something more exotic related to the severe undiagnosed illness he suffered at age 29 which killed several of his companions and left him partially deaf in his left ear and prone to bouts of bloody diarrhoea and severe fatigue? Dr Peter Watson of Addenbrooke’s University Hospital in the UK has written an outstanding article on the historical sleuthing involved in trying to tease these questions out. (The reference is in the show notes). Having examined the available historical evidence, including a finger and vertebra taken from Galileo’s body and preserved, he concludes that the likely cause of his rapid and painful development of complete blindness was most likely due to angle closure glaucoma. This condition occurs when the circulation of vitreous humour (the jellylike substance inside the eyeball) is obstructed by narrowing of the angle between the eyeball and the eyelid. Dr Watson speculates that the likeliest cause of this problem for Galileo was the long hours he had spent in low light looking through his telescopes throughout his life, as this type of exposure is considered a significant risk factor for angle closure glaucoma. These days angle-closure glaucoma can be very successfully treated with surgery.

George Ellery Hale was the founding father of the Mt Wilson and Mt Palomar observatories and made enormous contributions to both the science and the administration of astronomy. He was continually coming up with grandiose and ambitious plans for himself and everyone he worked with. In the later part of his life he famously suffered from mental illness and eventually was confined to an institution because of it. His Wikipedia page reports that he suffered from schizophrenia and described regular visits from an elf with whom he conversed. The story about Hale’s elf companion was even included in an episode of the X files where Mulder, with his usual uncritical credulity, repeats the story to Scully as if it was a well-known fact. In fact, Hale himself never used the term ‘elf’ in any of his correspondence, nor did he or any of his close companions ever mention long conversations with a supernatural adviser of any type. The story seems to have been started by his biographer, Helen Wright in her 1966 biography of Hale. Wright describes an episode where Hale wrote to his friend Harry Goodwin that he apparently received a visitation from a demon. Wright described this literally as a small man, and the use of the term elf was entirely her invention. In his other correspondence, Hale refers in several places to his ‘little demon’ or ‘demons’ and it is likely that he was personifying his mental illness, much in the same way that Winston Churchill used to refer to his severe bouts of depression as his ‘black dog’. Hale’s lifelong pattern of alternating periods of depression and very high energy, grandiosity and extreme hard work, followed by a late descent into psychosis is not consistent with schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia tend to begin showing symptoms in early adulthood, and have lifelong problems with organization and motivation, which was clearly not the case with Hale. The course of his long illness and the symptoms that are recorded in his documented records are far more consistent with Bipolar Affective Disorder, which used to be known as Manic Depression. The evidence to support this argument is presented in an excellent review article in the Journal of the History of Astronomy, which is in the notes.

That remarkable genius Enrico Fermi died at the age of 53 of stomach cancer. His Wikipedia page also reports that this was as a result of heavy radiation exposure, sustained through his career researching nuclear reactions. Interestingly, we now know that stomach cancer is almost entirely due to a combination of risk factors including smoking, eating certain carcinogenic foods and having your stomach play host to a bacterium called Helicobacter Pylori. While I haven’t been able to find out whether Fermi himself smoked, he certainly worked very closely with Robert Oppenheimer who was an Olympic-standard chain smoker, and many of his post-graduate students also smoked heavily. We have no idea whether Fermi was Helicobacter Pylori positive, but he would have had a fair chance of being so, as he lived in a time when there was no mass screening program for it, and no eradication programs for people diagnosed as carrying it. In some groups within the community, Helicobacter carriage rates are as high as 80%, and before widespread screening the average man or woman on the street had around a 40-60% chance of testing positive for it. With so many workplaces being smoke-free thee days, and with recognition of the role that Helicobacter Pylori plays in stomach cancer, Fermi would probably have lived a normal lifespan instead of being cut down in his prime by a largely preventable disease.

The next medical conundrum to look at is the mystery surrounding the untimely death of Jeremiah Horrocks, the English astronomer who was the only person on earth to correctly predict the 1639 transit of Venus. Horrocks lived and died in obscurity, and the value of his work was not recognized until well after his sudden death at the age of 22. Sudden unexpected deaths in young men are most often due to trauma or suicide these days. There has been no record of any coroner’s investigation or other legal proceeding arising out of his death, and his correspondence does not suggest he was depressed at the time. Horrocks was deeply religious, and it seems highly improbable that he would act against the dictates of his faith unless he was very unwell, and there is simply no evidence to support this idea. His closest friend William Crabtree was thunderstruck by Horrocks’ death and could give no theory of his own as to how it might have happened. There are no eyewitness accounts of his death but no other people in his household were unwell so an infectious or poisonous cause seems unlikely. My suggestion is that Horrocks suffered either a fatal brain haemorrhage or a sudden cardiac arrest. If it was a cardiac arrest one would perhaps expect some shortness of breath or possibly fainting spells to have been recorded prior to the fatal arrhythmia, and we know that Horrocks was completely well up to the time he died. On balance I think that a brain haemorrhage is more likely. A small aneurysm, which is a weakness in the wall of a blood vessel, can form deep in the brain without causing any problems, and can rupture and bleed without warning, with disastrous results. Brain aneurysms can cause a devastating and abrupt death in a completely healthy person with no preceding signs, exactly as described. We will however never know for sure unless new evidence comes to light, and this mysterious death certainly adds to the tragedy of the loss of such a scientific genius at such a young age.

I hope you’ve enjoyed finding out a bit more about the human side of these great astronomers, and hopefully some of those popular myths can now be countered with some better informed points of view. Keep an eye out for the next podcast in my series which will be about the technological overlap between astronomy and medicine. Clear skies to you all.

References:

1. ‘Hale’s Little Elf: The Mental Breakdowns of George Ellery Hale
William Sheehan and Donald Osterbrock
Journal of the History of Astronomy, Volume 31, pages 93-113, 2000

2.’The Enigma of Galileo’s Eyesight; Some Novel Observations on Galileo Galilei’s Vision and His Progression to Blindness’
Peter Watson
SURVEY OF OPHTHALMOLOGY VOLUME 54