Thomas Mann has a lot to answer for...
At least, I wonder if having read Doctor Faustus at an impressionable age lies behind the wild claims of a recent biographer that Benjamin Britten died of the syph.
Which it is contended he got from Peter Pears.
We should like to see some evidence that Pears actually had Ye Greate Poxxe, apart from speculative hypothesis that Britten died of something that might have been the outcome of late syphilis and if he had the latter he must have got it from somewhere and is not known to have been sexually promiscuous. (Thus, I suppose, goes the cobweb chain of reasoning...)
Physician who cared for composer in last three years of life casts doubt.
Britten's medical notes, seen by the Guardian but not available to Kildea before he wrote his biography, make no reference to syphilis, even by way of any accepted euphemisms for the infection current in the 1970s.
(In the 1970s??? WTF. I doubt medical notes alluded to 'the bad disease' or 'tainted blood' by that date, if they ever did. I think they would at least mention Wasserman + - though possibly it was a different test by then.)
Also, I cannot believe that conscientious medical personnel would not have given some indication in the notes if syphilis had been an issue, as it was a disease that there was a long history of health professionals contracting non-venereally via blood transfer, and this surely would have implications for case management health and safety.
I will concede that by the 1970s syphilis was rarely seen in common clinical practice, and I have seen articles from c. 1980s in medical journals suggesting that some cases diagnosed as senile dementia were in fact general paralysis of the insane, which docs were no longer identifying because it had fallen off the medical radar.
However, we note that the initial attack is supposed to have been a 1940 'bout of streptococcal tonsilitis' and I suspect that at that date, even given the massive decline in syphilis over the interwar period, doctors wouldn't have overlooked it had there been a likelihood.
But, whatever it says in the medical notes, somebody told somebody else, who told the biographer, that Britten totes had sifilis. So there. Totally incontrovertible evidence, no?
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