The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code (37 page)

A
ll of them are past helping, so it’s not clear why we bother. But whether it’s Chopin (cystic fibrosis?), Dostoyevsky (epilepsy?), Poe (rabies?), Jane Austen (adult chicken pox?), Vlad the Impaler (porphyria?), or Vincent van Gogh (half the
DSM
), we’re incorrigible about trying to diagnose the famous dead. We persist in guessing despite a rather dubious record, in fact. Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical advice. Doctors have confidently diagnosed Ebenezer Scrooge with OCD, Sherlock Holmes with autism, and Darth Vader with borderline personality disorder.

A gawking fascination with our heroes certainly explains some of this impulse, and it’s inspiring to hear how they overcame grave threats. There’s an undercurrent of smugness, too:
we
solved a mystery previous generations couldn’t. Above all, as one doctor remarked in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
in 2010, “The most enjoyable aspect of retrospective diagnoses [is that] there is always room for debate and, in the
face of no definitive evidence, room for new theories and claims.” Those claims often take the form of extrapolations—counterfactual sweeps that use mystery illnesses to explain the origins of masterpieces or wars. Did hemophilia bring down tsarist Russia? Did gout provoke the American Revolution? Did bug bites midwife Charles Darwin’s theories? But while our amplified knowledge of genetics makes trawling through ancient evidence all the more tempting, in practice genetics often adds to the medical and moral confusion.

For various reasons—a fascination with the culture, a ready supply of mummies, a host of murky deaths—medical historians have pried especially into ancient Egypt and into pharaohs like Amenhotep IV. Amenhotep has been called Moses, Oedipus, and Jesus Christ rolled into one, and while his religious heresies eventually destroyed his dynasty, they also ensured its immortality, in a roundabout way. In the fourth year of his reign in the mid-1300s BC, Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaten (“spirit of the sun god Aten”). This was his first step in rejecting the rich polytheism of his forefathers for a starker, more monotheistic worship. Akhenaten soon constructed a new “sun-city” to venerate Aten, and shifted Egypt’s normally nocturnal religious services to Aten’s prime afternoon hours. Akhenaten also announced the convenient discovery that he was Aten’s long-lost son. When hoi polloi began grumbling about these changes, he ordered his praetorian thugs to destroy any pictures of deities besides his supposed father, whether on public monuments or some poor family’s crockery. Akhenaten even became a grammar nazi, purging all traces of the plural hieroglyphic
gods
in public discourse.

Akhenaten’s seventeen-year reign witnessed equally heretical changes in art. In murals and reliefs from Akhenaten’s era, the birds, fish, game, and flowers start to look realistic for the first time. Akhenaten’s harem of artists also portrayed his royal
family—including Nefertiti, his most favored wife, and Tutankhamen, his heir apparent—in shockingly mundane domestic scenes, eating meals or caressing and smooching. Yet despite the care to get most details right, the bodies themselves of the royal family members appear grotesque, even deformed. It’s all the more mysterious because servants and other less-exalted humans in these portraits still look, well, human. Pharaohs in the past had had themselves portrayed as North African Adonises, with square shoulders and dancers’ physiques. Not Akhenaten; amid the otherwise overwhelming naturalism, he, Tut, Nefertiti, and other blue bloods look downright alien.

Archaeologists describing this royal art sound like carnival barkers. One promises you’ll “recoil from this epitome of physical repulsiveness.” Another calls Akhenaten a “humanoid praying mantis.” The catalog of freakish traits could run for pages: almond-shaped heads, squat torsos, spidery arms, chicken legs (complete with knees bending backward), Hottentot buttocks, Botox lips, concave chests, pendulous potbellies, and so on. In many pictures Akhenaten has breasts, and the only known nude statue of him has an androgynous, Ken-doll crotch. In short, these works are the anti-
David
, the anti–
Venus de Milo
, of art history.

As with the Hapsburg portraits, some Egyptologists see the pictures as evidence of hereditary deformities in the pharaonic line. Other evidence dovetails with this idea, too. Akhenaten’s older brother died in childhood of a mysterious ailment, and a few scholars believe Akhenaten was excluded from court ceremonies when young because of physical handicaps. And in his son Tut’s tomb, amid the plunder, archaeologists discovered 130 walking canes, many showing signs of wear. Unable to resist, doctors have retroactively diagnosed these pharaohs with all sorts of ailments, like Marfan syndrome and elephantiasis. But however suggestive, each diagnosis suffered from a crippling lack of hard evidence.

The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (
seated left
) had his court artists depict him and his family as bizarre, almost alien figures, leading many modern doctors to retrodiagnose Akhenaten with genetic ailments. (Andreas Praefcke)

Enter genetics. The Egyptian government had long hesitated to let geneticists have at their most precious mummies. Boring into tissues or bones inevitably destroys small bits of them, and paleogenetics was pretty iffy at first, plagued by contamination and inconclusive results. Only in 2007 did Egypt relent, allowing scientists to withdraw DNA from five generations of mummies, including Tut and Akhenaten. When combined with meticulous CT scans of the corpses, this genetic work helped resolve some enigmas about the era’s art and politics.

First, the study turned up no major defects in Akhenaten or his family, which hints that the Egyptian royals looked like
normal people. That means the portraits of Akhenaten—which sure don’t look normal—probably didn’t strive for verisimilitude. They were propaganda. Akhenaten apparently decided that his status as the sun god’s immortal son lifted him so far above the normal human rabble that he had to inhabit a new type of body in public portraiture. Some of Akhenaten’s strange features in the pictures (distended bellies, porcine haunches) call to mind fertility deities, so perhaps he wanted to portray himself as the womb of Egypt’s well-being as well.

All that said, the mummies did show subtler deformities, like clubbed feet and cleft palates. And each succeeding generation had more to endure. Tut, of the fourth generation, inherited both clubfoot and a cleft palate. He also broke his femur when young, like Toulouse-Lautrec, and bones in his foot died because of poor congenital blood supply. Scientists realized why Tut suffered so when they examined his genes. Certain DNA “stutters” (repetitive stretches of bases) get passed intact from parent to child, so they offer a way to trace lineages. Unfortunately for Tut, both his parents had the same stutters—because his mom and dad had the same parents. Nefertiti may have been Akhenaten’s most celebrated wife, but for the crucial business of producing an heir, Akhenaten turned to a sister.

This incest likely compromised Tut’s immune system and did the dynasty in. Akhenaten had, one historian noted, “a pathological lack of interest” in anything beyond Egypt, and Egypt’s foreign enemies gleefully raided the kingdom’s outer edges, imperiling state security. The problem lingered after Akhenaten died, and a few years after the nine-year-old Tut assumed the throne, the boy renounced his father’s heresies and restored the ancient gods, hoping for better fortune. It didn’t come. While working on Tut’s mummy, scientists found scads of malarial DNA deep inside his bones. Malaria wasn’t uncommon then; similar tests reveal that both of Tut’s grandparents had it, at least
twice, and they both lived until their fifties. However, Tut’s malarial infection, the scientists argued, “added one strain too many to a body that”—because of incestuous genes—“could no longer carry the load.” He succumbed at age nineteen. Indeed, some strange brown splotches on the walls inside Tut’s tomb provide clues about just how sudden his decline was. DNA and chemical analysis has revealed these splotches as biological in origin: Tut’s death came so quickly that the decorative paint on the tomb’s inner walls hadn’t dried, and it attracted mold after his retinue sealed him up. Worst of all, Tut compounded his genetic defects for the next generation by taking a half sister as his own wife. Their only known children died at five months and seven months and ended up as sorry swaddled mummies in Tut’s tomb, macabre additions to his gold mask and walking sticks.

Powerful forces in Egypt never forgot the family’s sins, and when Tut died heirless, an army general seized the throne. He in turn died childless, but another commander, Ramses, took over. Ramses and his successors expunged most traces of Akhenaten, Tut, and Nefertiti in the annals of the pharaohs, erasing them with the same determination Akhenaten had shown in erasing other gods. As a final insult, Ramses and his heirs erected buildings over Tut’s tomb to conceal it. In fact, they concealed it so well that even looters struggled to find it. As a result, Tut’s treasures survived mostly intact over the centuries—treasures that, in time, would grant him and his heretical, incestuous family something like immortality again.

To be sure, for every well-reasoned retrodiagnosis—Tut, Toulouse-Lautrec, Paganini, Goliath (gigantism, definitely)—there are some doozies. Probably the most egregious retrodiagnosis began in 1962, when a doctor published a paper on porphyria, a group of red-blood-cell disorders.

Porphyria leads to a buildup of toxic by-products that can (depending on the type) disfigure the skin, sprout unwanted body hair, or short-circuit the nerves and induce psychosis. The doctor thought this sounded a lot like werewolves, and he floated the idea that widespread fables about wolf-people might have a medical basis. In 1982 a Canadian biochemist went one better. He noted other symptoms of porphyria—blistering in sunlight, protruding teeth, bloody red urine—and started giving talks suggesting that the disease seemed more likely to inspire tales about vampires. When pressed to explain, he declined to write up a scientific paper, and followed up instead (not a good sign) by appearing on a national U.S. talk show. On Halloween. Viewers heard him explain that “vampire” porphyrics had roamed about at night because of the blistering, and had probably found relief from their symptoms by drinking blood, to replace missing blood components. And what of the famously infectious vampire bite? Porphyric genes run in families, he argued, but it often takes stress or shock to trigger an outbreak. A brother or sister nipping at you and sucking your blood surely qualifies as stressful.

The show drew lots of attention and soon had worried-sick porphyrics asking their physicians if they would mutate into blood-lusting vampires. (A few years later, a deranged Virginia man even stabbed and dismembered his porphyric buddy to protect himself.) These incidents were all the more unfortunate because the theory is hogwash. If nothing else, the traits we consider classically vampiric, like a nocturnal nature, weren’t common in folklore vampires. (Most of what we know today are late-nineteenth-century tropes that Bram Stoker invented.) Nor do the supposed scientific facts tally. Drinking blood would bring no relief, since the blood components that cure porphyria don’t survive digestion. And genetically, while many porphyrics do suffer from sunburns, the really horrific, blistering burns that might evoke thoughts of supernatural evil are limited to one
rare type of porphyria mutation. Just a few hundred cases of it have been documented, ever, far too few to explain the widespread vampire hysteria of centuries past. (Some villages in eastern Europe were tilling their graveyards once per week to search for vampires.) Overall, then, the porphyria fiasco explains more about modern credulity—how willingly people believe things with a scientific veneer—than the origins of folklore monsters.