Vincent Van Gogh: Chemicals, Crisis, and Creativity (review)

According to an old saying, the journey is more important than the destination, the process more gratifying than the product. In some ways, this book is a model of that. Its explicit purpose is to find the chemical, biological, and medical factors that caused or in some way contributed to the tragic self-destructive plight of Vincent van Gogh. Why did he cut off a portion of his ear? Why did he shoot himself? Did his "madness" in some way contribute to the gestural style and pictorial content of his paintings? The answers offered by this book are both fascinating and persuasive (far more convincing than those of other authors, whose range of explanations include epilepsy, alcoholism, manic-depression, schizophrenia, syphilis, and so on). The artist was not insane, concludes this author, who is a biochemist at the University of Kansas Medical Center, but rather he probably "suffered from an inherited, debilitating disease [called acute intermittent por-phyria (or AIP)], which was unrecognized in his day. His life style [excessive drinking, malnutrition] provoked symptoms, exacerbated his condition, precipitated acute attacks, and shortened his life." That said, the most riveting part of the book is not its conclusions, but the spellbinding process by which they are reached. More than anything else, it is its elegant line of questioning, an exemplar of scientific reasoning, that is the real subject of this book. If all this sounds daunting to a non-scientist, it really is not. The author is a skilled writer with a delightfully dry sense of humor. Despite the technical nature of its subject matter, it is a highly accessible book that reads more like a well-written mystery than a medical diagnosis.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, Fall 2001.)