The Hindu : International : `Upright' Goethe had back pain

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 14, 2004

International

International

`Upright' Goethe had back pain

London: He is Germany's most famous literary son, whose upright posture deep into old age impressed many of his contemporaries. But it emerged on Tuesday that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — the biggest name in the German cultural pantheon and the German-speaking world's answer to Shakespeare — suffered for more than 40 years from acute backache. According to Dr. Herbert Ullrich, a German anthropologist who has just published a book on the skeletons of famous people, for most of his life Goethe had extreme difficulty in bending over. By the time of his death in 1832, at 82, the author of `Faust' and `The Sorrows of Young Werther' had also lost most of his teeth. A study of his bones showed that several of his ribs had fused, making it hard to breath, Dr. Ullrich said. Dr. Ullrich was one of the experts in Communist East Germany who in 1961 secretly travelled to Weimar, the birthplace of the German enlightenment and the city where Goethe lived and died. There, they lifted the lid off his sarcophagus. Newly released black and white photos of Goethe's skeleton revealed that he was suffering from Morbus Forestier, a severe pathological deformation, where several vertebrae fuse, Dr. Ullrich said. The disease set in when Goethe was about 40, he added.

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