Well, he was awfully pale... ;^)
Posted on 09/06/2011 10:18:32 AM PDT by billorites
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has died a hundred deaths, more or less. Here's a new one: darkness.
Doctors over the years have resurrected the story of Mozart's death again and again, each time proposing some alternative horrifying medical reason why the 18th century's most celebrated and prolific composer keeled over at age 35. A new monograph suggests that Mozart died from too little sunlight.
The researchers give us a simple theory. When exposed to sunlight, people's skin naturally produces vitamin D. Mozart, toward the end of his life, was nearly as nocturnal as a vampire, so his skin probably produced very little vitamin D. (The man failed to take any vitamin D supplements to counteract that deficiency. But that wasn't Mozart's fault. Only much later, in the 1920s, did scientists identify a clear link between vitamin D, sunlight, and good health. Vitamin D supplements did not go on sale in Salzburg and Vienna, Mozart's home towns, until many years after that.)
Stefan Pilz (who, if he plays his cards right, will hereafter be known as "Vitamin" Pilz) and William B Grant published their report, called Vitamin D Deficiency Contributed to Mozart's Death, in a journal called Medical Problems of Performing Artists. Pilz is a physician/researcher at the Medical University of Graz, Austria. Grant is a California physicist whose background is in optical and laser remote sensing of the atmosphere, and atmospheric sciences.
Pilz and Grant explain: "Mozart did much of his composing at night, so would have slept during much of the day. At the latitude of Vienna, 48º N, it is impossible to make vitamin D from solar ultraviolet-B irradiance for about six months of the year. Mozart died on 5 December, 1791, two to three months into the vitamin D winter."
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Pingy.
LMAO! Must be a constant discussion of alcohol abuse and heroin addiction. I would love to get some back issues from the 80s!
I thought he croaked because his notes were too tight?
Well, he was awfully pale... ;^)
Oh my. My dermatologist has been telling me for years how BAD sunlight is. The American Academy of Dermatology will not be happy with this news. ;-)
Another interesting but baseless and pointless theory
Way back when I took my ten year-old to see Amadeus. At the end they dumped his body into a common grave with other paupers and then threw in what I thought was probably lye. The boy said, “Ah, he was so poor they had to bury him in flour”.
Still makes me laugh.
There were just too many of them and just a few needed to be cut. Well, there is is.
LOL, nice.
Mozart’s obituary notice should have read “No flour by request”
Wow. I wouldn’t have guessed that they cut his notes.
Oh, the shame. Oh, the humanity!
At first, I thought he might have been wearing his flats too tightly.
Years later, when people would pass by the common grave they heard this weird music, like a symphony being played backwards. They finally concluded that it was just Mozart decomposing.
Now I will also be laughing about “No flour by request”.
Thanks!
LOL again. Oh that Emperor Joseph II, what a card.
I am quite certain that he died as a result of Rheumatic Heart and REnal disease. Vit D deficiency was probably endemic in the Winter months...but you don’t die from that...
Another example of mental masturbation by our intelligentsia...probably by way of a gov’t approved research grant.
He should have stayed in Salzburg, where he was born—it’s not as far north as Vienna.
> ... Vit D deficiency was probably endemic in the Winter months...but you don’t die from that...
Besides a lack of the sunshine vitamin, in the late winter months, people used to run out of vegetables and greens and ate mostly meats. They then contracted what was called “Cabin Fever” or “Spring Fever”. It was actually a lack of vitamins of various kinds. The contracted rickets, scurvey, beri-beri and many other things. When vegetables were available in the late spring, the diseases subsided.
Lye?
Try lime. Limestone.
Both are corrosive but quite different.
Meant lime. Thanks for the correction. Actually have no idea what it was.
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