A Karger 'Publishing Highlights 1890–2015' title The study of how a neurological disorder can change the artistic activity and behavior of creative people is a largely unexplored field. This publication looks closer at famous painters, writers, composers and philosophers of the 18th to the 20th centuries who suffered from neurological diseases such as stroke, epilepsy, brain trauma and dementia. The diseases of Gershwin, Kant, Musorgsky, Poe, Ravel, Van Gogh and many more are diagnosed in retrospect and treatment options according to modern medical technologies are discussed.
Presenting fascinating insights into the relationship between brain disease and creativity in famous minds, this publication is highly recommended to neurologists, psychiatrists, physicians as well as to everybody interested in art, music and literature.
179 - 188: Robert Schumann’s Focal Dystonia
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Published:2005
Eckart Altenmüller, 2005. "Robert Schumann’s Focal Dystonia", Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, J. Bogousslavsky, F. Boller
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Abstract
Robert Schumann is one of the most prominent composers of the early romantic period.He was born in Zwickau, Saxony, in 1810. Early in his adolescence, he displayed extraordinaryskills in piano playing and attempted to become a concert pianist. After an initial success,increasing technical difficulties hampered pianistic progress in the years 1831 and1832. Finally, he developed a task-specific loss of voluntary control of the middle finger inhis right hand. By means of a finger-stretching device, Schumann tried to improve the situation.In parallel, he composed the Toccata, Op. 7, a piano work which allowed high level virtuosoperformance without the use of the middle finger of the right hand. However, from1833, he almost completely gave up playing piano literature, but continued to improvise.Robert Schumann was suffering from a focal, task specific dystonia of the right hand, alsoreferred to as pianist’s cramp. This disorder is characterized by a painless loss of skilledmotor control in a task specific context. The neurobiological origin is seen in maladaptiveplasticity of neuronal networks with blurring of afferent and efferent receptive fields of adjacentfinger representations in the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia. The general basis ofsuch a blurring may consist in a deficient lateral inhibition of synaptic pathways. Risk factorsfor developing musician’s dystonia are male gender, extensive cumulative practice time,extreme motor workload concerning the temporal and spatial quality of the affected movementsand personality traits such as proneness to anxiety and perfectionism. All these factorscan be demonstrated in Robert Schumann’s early life.
