The Disease of the Italian Poet Giacomo Leopardi
Erik Pietro Sganzerla — Michele Augusto Riva: «The Disease of the Italian Poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837): A Case of Juvenile Ankylosing Spondylitis in the 19th Century?» [Journal of Clinical Rheumatology, Volume 23, Number 4, June 2017 • DOI: 10.1097/RHU.0000000000000534]
ABSTRACT
Some authors sustained that the pessimistic thought of the Italian writer and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) may be attributed to his unhappy life, characterized by several health problems. His philosophical theories appear as the result of depressive and melancholic state, related to his precarious health conditions, so limiting their intrinsic values. Several authors formulated various hypotheses on the diseases that Leopardi suffered from and postulated different theories on the cause of his early death. This article assumed that Leopardi may have been affected by juvenile ankylosing spondylitis, conditioning spinal deformities, relapsing-remitting uveitis, urinary tract and bowel tract problems, and acute arthritis. Chest deformity, as a complication of juvenile ankylosing spondylitis, may have caused progressive cardiorespiratory failure, worsened by recurrent bronchial and pulmonary complications, until his death caused by acute right ventricular heart failure. The acknowledgment of a physical cause of Leopardi's disease contributes to reevaluate his «cosmic pessimism» as an original expression of his thought, so leading a general revaluation of the figure of one of the most important European thinkers of the 19th century.
CONCLUSIONS
In the last 2 centuries, several scholars have tried to investigate the causes of disease and death of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, identifying different conditions. Tubercular spondylitis (Pott disease) is still the most credited cause of the famous hump of Leopardi, but descriptions of health conditions of the poet by Leopardi himself and by eyewitnesses (his father, his close friend Ranieri, physicians who visited him) seem to confute these hypotheses. When a patient is affected by different symptoms, clinical reasoning suggests that a syndrome is more likely than the coexistence of multiple diseases. In our opinion, signs and symptoms of the Italian writer could be ascribed to a single condition (Juvenile ankylosing spondylitis [JAS]), whereas his early death may be caused by a right ventricular heart failure, a complication related to his primary rheumatic disease. Signs of ankylosing spondylitis are often reported by paleopathologists in human remains, but symptoms of this condition are rarely described in patients in the pastime, especially in the youngest ones. In particular, this condition was not well described in children until the 1960s. Therefore, the Italian writer may represent one of the first clinical descriptions of JAS, even if this diagnosis cannot be confirmed by the analysis of his remains. This potential primacy (first clinical description of JAS in history) is not the only reason why it is necessary to investigate Leopardi’s disease. As aforementioned, some authors sustained that precarious Leopardi’s health condition played a role in the development of his pessimistic thought. Past and modern critics attributed health problems to psychosomatic illnesses, so reducing his philosophical theories to a mere expression of a depressive and melancholic state or of a mental disease that the poet suffered from. For this reason, the acknowledgment of a physical cause of Leopardi’s disease contributes to reevaluate his “cosmic pessimism” as an original result of his thought, so leading a general revaluation of the figure of one of the most important European thinkers of the 19th century.
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