Thomas Wolfe: The Enigma Of His Death

Dr. Michael L. Furcolow Dr. R. Dietz Wolfe Thomas Wolfe: The Enigma Of His Death By MICHAEL L. FURCOLOW, M.D. and R. DIETZ WOLFE, M.D.e Dr. Furcohw and Dr. Wolfe are both noted physicians. Dr. Wolfe, the nephew of Thomas Wolfe is Director of Medical Education at St. Joseph's Infirmary in Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Furcolow, now Professor Emeritus of Community Medicine at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, Lexington, is widely recognized and has published many articles resulting from his medical studies and investigations. Primarily through his kind consent, the present article was written for Appalachian Heritage with the aid of Dr. Wolfe. It is rewarding to be reminded that doctors have not only a deep concern for the improvement of medical practice hut for the creative life as well. 35 I first became interested in the story of Thomas Wolfe several years ago at the time I was working with Dr. Dietz Wolfe, Tom's nephew, who is director of the Medical Education at St. Joseph's Infirmary in Louisville , Kentucky. As a result of a number of conversations about Thomas Wolfe I had with him and some peculiar items in this medical history, Dr. Wolfe and I decided to inquire into the causes of his death Dr. Wolfe gave me several of Thomas Wolfe's books, and one of the volumes he gave me was about Thomas Wolfe's life and death. He was such a tremendously vital and dynamic man. A large man, 6 feet 7 inches tall, he literally let the words come forth like a torrent, all of which described things which were close to the heart of any American. One had the feeling that one could listen or read forever of his prose, although it was almost overpowering as the description of his feeling for books "he plundered through their golden leaves as a man who first discovers a buried and inestimable treasure, and at first is dumb with joy at his discovery and can only plunge his hands in it with drunken joy, scoop handfuls up and pour it over him and let the massy gold leak out again in golden rain through his spread hands; or as a man who discovers some enchanted spring of ageless youth, of ever-living immortality , and drinks of it, and can never drink enough, and drinks and feels with every drink the huge summation of earth's glory in his own enrichment, the ageless fires of its magic youth". Who of us who has ever aspired to write can watch such fire and can help but grieve that it was quenched at only 38. Our interests from a medical point of view focus on the cause of his death. He supposedly died of tuberculosis meningitis (tuberculosis of the brain). He died at Johns Hopkins University following an operation by Dr. Walter Dandy who was the first neurosurgeon in America if not in the world. It might be considered presumptuous to wonder about this diagnosis by Dr. Dandy except that it did not agree with the pathogenesis of tuberculosis as we understand it. Our present concept of the disease is that meningitis is the result of dissemination of the germs through the blood stream to the brain. This disseminnation occurse a short time after infection or it does not occur at all. The same process occurs with all the chronic granulomatous diseases ( tuberculososis, histoplasmosis, blastomycosis or coccidiodomycosis ) . In these diseases the infection disseminates or is contained fairly early in the course after infection, say a month or six weeks. Now it was well known that Thomas Wolfe came from a family with tuberculosis . His brother and another close relative had died of tuberculosis, and a diagnosis of tuberculosis had been made on Tom Wolfe during his college career. It seemed relatively certain, therefore, that he had been infected with tuberculosis at an early age and in fact was reported to have a chest lesion due to tuberculosis during his student days at Harvard. The disease apparently healed and caused him no further trouble until the time of his death at age 38. Let us support this with a quote from a member of...