A postscript concerning Wagner's eyestrain / by Wm. Ashton Ellis.

  • Ellis, William Ashton, 1852-1919.
Date:
[1908]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A postscript concerning Wagner's eyestrain / by Wm. Ashton Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    19/32 (page 19)
    At about 30 years of age an excess of writing work overtaxed his nerves so much that he “often sat down and wept for a quarter of an hour at a stretch,” and he was a constant victim of a feeble stomach. At this time an extreme amount of work with his pen \Tannhmser\ brought on the idea of sudden death which in the same circumstances reappeared many times during his life and threatened to drive him to suicide. The medical man warned him against work, fearing “the determination of blood to the head,” and ordered leaves of absence for three months, etc.f With each increment of added accommodation-failure things go from bad to worse every year, until at the age of 35 years Wagner feels “too old” for undertaking his greatest art-work. Depression and suffering, “broken-downness,” always follow near-work with the eyes, and especially so in winter, his “mortal enemy,” when vitality was always lowered, because there was more confinement in the house and hence more reading and writing. A hundred statements grow ever clearer and clearer that writing and reading are becoming more and more impossible, produce greater and greater suffering, and that after each opera, poem, or literary work the ill-health is more tragical . . . Finally, the “nerves of his brain are so overwrought that the writing is reduced to two hours a day, instead of five or six as formerly, and the writing of a few lines of a letter sets him in violent commotion.” As all ophthal- mologists instruct their patients, so Wagner found by experience that he had frequently to interrupt even his two hours a day of eye- work. Every job of composition or writing “takes much out of him” and he has “to rest it off.” Headache, sleeplessness, the “working by spurts,” “with long interruptions,” a hundred such t“As I write this a patient comes in bright and happy and healthy who two months ago was the absolute reverse of these things, and whose life had been made as miserable as that of Wagner and from the same cause. In his melancholy and suffering his greatest danger had been suicide. Great nerve specialists had drugged him to stupor or had ‘rested’ him nearly to death . (Dr. G.’s footnote.)