Bruegel & Diagnosis

Writers of doctoral dissertations ransack mightily obscure quarries for old stones to be turned. New-fledged Paris Pathologist Tony-Michel Torrilhon, who did his stone-turning in Europe's art libraries, last week turned in a thesis on the maimed, ailing creatures of the great, earthy 16th century painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Torrilhon's hypothesis: in painting after painting, Bruegel reproduced the maladies of his Low Country peasants with a diagnostician's keen eye.

Some U.S. physicians have already disagreed with Torrilhon's diagnoses, but he has cited enough evidence to make his case fascinatingly arguable (and to nail his M.D. from the University of Paris). In The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, Torrilhon spies out a small, red-coated figure lacking both feet and half an arm, lying on its back. His diagnosis: amputations following "a typical case of Buerger's disease, i.e., gangrene caused by thromboangiitis obliterans" (an inflammatory disease affecting blood vessels). In the same picture another male figure drags wasted legs behind him as he creeps along on both hands. Writes Torrilhon: either syphilitic tabes or poliomyelitis.

As Torrilhon interprets it, Bruegel's Mad Meg, in which a gaunt witch of a woman, clutching a variety of household objects, strides wildly under a flaming sky amid a hell's choir of monsters, is a painted description of "chronic hallucinatory psychosis due to menopause . . . The painting is full of obscene little monsters, and Meg seems obsessed by genital hallucinations. Two other symptoms are her careless and bizarre dress and her mania for collecting things. It is well known that old women suffering from this type of psychosis have a mania for carrying all their belongings."

Perhaps reading too far, Torrilhon detects myxedema (underactive thyroid) in the swollen eyelids, sparse lashes, dry hair and "shivering, apathetic aspect" of the bride in the renowned canvas, The Peasant Wedding. (Critic Gilbert Highet saw the bride as "a healthy, blowsy heifer," whose smirk and downcast eyes hide unseemly thoughts: "I'm glad I'm getting married. I don't much like my husband, but he is rich.") In the five sightless beggars stumbling into a ditch in the famous Parable of the Blind, Torrilhon sees a whole ophthalmological catalogue. From left to right, he diagnoses pronounced pemphigus (a skin disease) localized around the eyes, which has caused opaque corneas; some form of blindness in which bright light is painful (the figure's hat is pulled down over his eyes); atrophy of the eyeballs, probably caused by glaucoma or panophthalmia; corneal leukoma (corneas thickened from an ulcer, wound or inflammation); and enucleation (surgical removal of eyes).

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