Nietzsches Madness: Did Nietzsche Suffer from Syphilis?
#spacer{clear:left}#abc #sidebar{margin-top:1.5em}if(zs>0){zSB(3,3)}else{gEI(“spacer”).style.display=’none’;gEI(“sidebar”).style.display=’none’}A popular story about Friedrich Nietzsche is that he went insane because of being infected with syphilis. The evidence for this is quite scanty, though – it seems that he was “diagnosed” with syphilis simply because that was a common condition, not because his symptoms truly fit the disease. In fact, there are good reasons to think that he suffered from something else entirely. Issue 23 of The Philosophers’ Magazine reports: [Leonard] Sax, executive director of the Montgomery Center for Research in Child and Adolescent Development, argues that there is no record of Nietzsche suffering any of the symptoms associated with paretic syphilis, the diagnosis at the time of his admission to a psychiatric asylum in Basel in January 1889. … Sax argues that Nietzsche’s final breakdown was the culmination of a far longer process more consistent with a me
