Saint Roch and Social Distancing During Pandemics: Lessons to be Remembered.

Surprisingly, Catholic hagiography can teach us a lot about medicine. As an example, we present here the history of Saint Roch who is considered, along with Saint Sebastian, one of the two main Saints who act as protectors against plagues and have often been invoked by Catholic people during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas Saint Sebastian is associated with plagues only symbolically, Catholic tradition considers Saint Roch to have had real contact with the bubonic plague. Indeed, during his pilgrimage to Rome, Saint Roch helped people suffering from the plague and was, subsequently, himself infected. He was then forced to retire in solitary confinement to avoid the plague's spread and followed scrupulously the necessary restrictive measures. Saint Roch's story provides useful lessons about the importance of social responsibility by respecting the restrictive rules during difficult times such as the COVID-19 epidemic.

Beethoven: His Hearing Loss and His Hearing Aids.

: To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the great classical composer, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), we point out how his hearing loss affected him and how the primitive hearing aids at that time helped mitigate his hearing loss. From the age of 26, Beethoven began to suffer from a fluctuating, progressive hearing loss ("my hearing grew worse and worse"), This started in his left ear ("in my left ear, with which this illness of my ears had started"), where he had difficulty hearing higher pitched tones ("I don't hear the high notes of the instruments and voices") and words ("Sometimes, I cannot hear people who speak quietly, I can hear the sounds, but not the words") and associated with tinnitus ("my ears, they still keep buzzing and humming day and night") and loudness recruitment ("if someone yells, it is unbearable to me").However, in spite of his hearing loss, Beethoven never lost his love for music and continued composing music, at times using some of the acoustic hearing aids that were just being developed. We analyze and describe the ear trumpets, and the resonant plate that engineer Johan Nepomuk Maelzel and piano-maker Conrad Graf, respectively, constructed to try to improve Beethoven's hearing. Moreover, we discuss the possible use of a wooden drumstick Beethoven might have used to improve his perception of the piano's sound.

Amedeo Modigliani and his "great secret": a brief history of medical and social aspects of tuberculosis in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The pathography of the famous painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) shows that he had tuberculosis and died of tubercular meningitis aged 35. The nineteenth century was characterized by numerous milestones in the history of tuberculosis. In 1853, Hermann Brehmer, first used the term tuberculosis referred to at the time as "phthisis". In 1865, Jean Antoine Villemin demonstrated the infectious etiology of the disease. This was confirmed in 1882 by Robert Koch by identifying the tubercle bacillus. Koch also invented the diagnostic tuberculin test. Charles Mantoux and Florence Seibert improved this test. Identification of the infectious etiology of tuberculosis led to experiments of effective treatments for this disease. The most successful treatment for tuberculosis was by sanatorium regime. From the late nineteenth century, more invasive therapeutic approaches such as artificial pneumothorax were introduced. The advent of streptomycin in 1945 changed the social view of tuberculosis. This previously romanticized disease became a social stigma which was associated with poor social and moral standards; patients were kept in isolation. Fearing social ostracism, Modigliani refused treatment for tuberculosis and instead deliberately fostered his reputation as an alcoholic and addict in order to conceal the disease.

Did Frédéric Chopin Die From Heart Failure?

On October 17, 1849, Poland's greatest composer, Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) died aged 39. His cause of death remains unknown. An investigation of the documental sources was performed to reconstruct the medical history of the artist. Since his earliest years, his life had been dominated by poor health. Recurrent episodes of cough, fever, headaches, lymphadenopathy- a series of symptoms that may be attributed to viral respiratory infections- manifested in his teens. Later in life, he had chest pain, hemoptysis, hematemesis, neuralgia, and arthralgia. Exhaustion and breathlessness characterized all his adult life. Coughing, choking, and edema of the legs and ankles manifested four months before his death. Several hypotheses ranging from cystic fibrosis to alpha-1 anti-trypsin deficiency and pulmonary tuberculosis have been proposed to explain Chopin's lifelong illness. We suggest that Chopin had dilated cardiomyopathy with consequent heart failure and cirrhosis that caused his death.