SOURCE: "Mortification of the Emancipated Flesh: The Case of Heine," in Hypatia: Essays in Classics, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy, edited by William M. Calder III, Ulrich K. Goldsmith, and Phyllis B. Kenevan, Colorado Associated University Press, 1985, pp. 187-98.

In the following essay, Sammons studies the link between Heine's illness and his literary creativity.

The medical report on nineteenth-century German literature is quite varied and therefore probably statistically insignificant; no specific theme seems to run through it. There is, of course, the litany of early deaths: Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, dead of typhus at twenty-five in 1798; Novalis of tuberculosis at twenty-nine in 1801; Schiller of acute pneumonia, his system weakened by a long list of internal disorders, including peritonitis, strangulation of the colon, chronic bronchitis, nephritis, and myocarditis, at forty-five in 1805.¹ The young genius Georg Büchner was lamentably cut off by meningitis at twenty-three in 1837, just at the point at...