Viennese vibrations: doctors, lungs and opera

Abstract

Links between music and medicine typically focus on ailments, known or suspected, of composers — Beethoven’s deafness, Chopin’s tuberculosis, Schubert’s syphilis, Schumann’s mental disorder, Mozart’s nearly everything, Paganini’s suspected Ehlers–Danlos syndrome. But few doctors have actually written an opera libretto. One exception was the Austrian physician Josef Leopold Auenbrugger (1722–1809). Show more