ufferings which that disease caused him?
The first of these questions has been answered as conclusively as seems
possible on the basis of all available data, by a doctor of medicine, S.
Rahmer, in what is at this time the most recent and most authoritative
study that has been published on the subject.[185] Stage by stage he
follows the development of the disease, from its earliest indications in
the poet's incessant nervous headaches, which he ascribes to
neurasthenic causes. He attempts to quote all the passages in Heine's
letters which throw light upon his physical condition, and points out
that in the second stage of the disease the first symptoms of paralysis
made their appearance as early as 1832, and not in 1837 as the
biographers have stated. To this was added in 1837 an acute affection of
the eyes, which continued to recur from this time on. In addition to the
pathological process which led to a complete paralysis of almost the
whole body, Rahmer notes other symptoms first mentioned in 1846, which
he describes as "bulbaer" in their origin, such as difficulty in
controlling the muscles of speech, difficulty in chewing and swallowing,
the enfeebling of the muscles of the lips, disturbances in the functions
of the glottis and larynx, together with abnormal secretion of saliva.
He discredits altogether the diagnosis of Heine's disease as consumption
of the spinal marrow, to which Klein-Hattingen in his recent book on
Hoelderlin, Lenau and Heine[186] still adheres, dismisses as
scientifically untenable the popular idea that the poet's physical
dissolution was the result of his sensual excesses, finally diagnoses
the case as "die spinale Form der progressiven Muskelatrophie"[187] and
maintains that it was either directly inherited, or at least developed
on the basis of an inherited disposition.[188] He finds further
evidence in support of the latter theory in the fact that the first
symptoms of the disease made their appearance in early youth, not many
years after puberty, and concludes that, in spite of scant information
as to Heine's ancestors, we are safe in assuming a hereditary taint on
the father's side.

The poet himself evidently would have us believe as much, for in his
Reisebilder he says: "Wie ein Wurm nagte das Elend in meinem Herzen und
nagte,--ich habe dieses Elend mit mir zur Welt gebracht. Es lag schon
mit mir in der Wiege, und wenn meine Mutter mich wiegte, so wiegte sie
es mit, und wenn sie mich in d