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41 POLISH DISEASE The organ of the ear sometimes provokes very bizarre sympathetic movements, which, in all probability, have their source in the ganglionic system. . . . I know a distinguished pianist, of tremendously nervous temperament; he often has trouble urinating and is often subject to all possible trouble [toutes les peines du monde] without being at liberty to satisfy his needs; yet whistling or a few chords on the piano frees this obstruction in an instant. The intimate connection existing between the human ear and the abdominal viscera by the sympathetic nerves permits these organs to have a significant influence upon the organ of hearing.1 These words formed part of an argument made by Jan Matuszyński behind the great gated colonnades of the École de médecine in Paris on 16 August 1837. The school was a celebrated institution, the foremost of its kind in Europe. The occasion was the oral exam of a doctoral thesis entitled “The Influence of the Sympathetic Nervous System on the Function of the Senses.” A jury of two professors and two proctors in gowns and mortarboards guarded the solemnity of the event. For young initiates, such trials were the crowning achievement after four years of medical training. Largely symbolic, they marked entry into the establishment—literally , in the case of Matuszyński, as he would join the faculty in the years to come. One hundred copies of his thesis, issued by the school, were printed for circulation among benefactors, colleagues, family, and friends.2 Among these last, probably in situ to witness the occasion, was the graduate’s closest companion, former schooland flatmate, the “distinguished pianist” himself, Frédéric Chopin. 2 Reflecting on Reflex A Touching New Fact about Chopin 42 Reflecting on Reflex Matuszyński’s proud moment had been long in coming. Seven years earlier the student had cut short his degree in Warsaw to enlist as a medic in the November Uprising against Russian occupation. Later in 1831, when the insurrection failed, he slipped across the German border and enrolled for a second academic stint at the University of Tübingen. A study of plica polonica (Polish plait)—a rare condition of the scalp involving the strange growth of matted hair thought endemic to Polish sensibility and the nervous-magnetic emanations that swirled around the ethnic cranium—suggested itself. By 1834 Matuszyński had published a monograph on the malady, this several years before its Chopinesque thematization in Honoré de Balzac’s L’Initié (The Initiate).3 Balzac’s novella, set in 1836, tells the story of a young do-gooder, Godefroid, who is moved to assist an impoverished aristocrat, the former prosecutor general under the restoration. The plight of the nobleman, bunkered in a squalid Parisian apartment, is peculiarly affecting in view of his half-Polish daughter, Vanda. For medical reasons, the proud retiree and widower keeps this frail, mysterious girl in ignorance of his indigence. Selling his books and saving where he can, the Baron maintains one room of their lodgings in determined luxury. He and her son thus shield Vanda’s exquisite sensibility and propensity to nervous attack from the terrible destitution of the outer rooms. In a memorable episode, Godefroid enters the apartment to find pale-skinned, bed-ridden Vanda—a “singular and mysterious creature”—at the harmonium: “The patient seemed to him transfigured by the pleasure she felt in making music; her face was radiant, her eyes were sparkling like diamonds.” She flung herself “upon the little organ as a starving man flings himself on food” to render Rossini’s famous “Dal tuo stellato soglio”: Vanda made a sign to her son, who placed himself in such a way as to press with his foot the pedal which filled the bellows; and then the invalid, whose fingers had for the time recovered all their strength and agility, raising her eyes to heaven like Saint Cecilia, played the “Prayer of Moses in Egypt,” which her son had bought for her and which she had learned by heart in a few hours. Godefroid recognized in her playing the same quality as in Chopin’s. The soul was satisfied by divine sounds of which the dominant note was that of tender melancholy.4 In so many words, Balzac embroidered stories of Polish vulnerability and pitiableness that were by then familiar, tales of a proud but ultimately pathetic pianoplaying people. But not even Polish plait could keep Matuszyński in southwestern Germany forever. By 1834 new challenges had...

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