The letters of William von Humboldt to a lady friend: The first detailed description of Parkinson's disease by a patient

Abstract

Wilhelm (William) von Humboldt (1767–1835) was a major European figure of the Napoleonic era. The son of a Prussian aristocrat and his wife of French Huguenot descent, the elder brother of the explorer and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt, and friend of Goethe and Schiller, Humboldt enjoyed a long period of independent study and travel before entering civil service at the age of 32. As a diplomat, he was appointed Ambassador to the Vatican, Vienna and London, and represented Prussia at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. As Undersecretary of State for Education, he inspired the Berlin University that now bears his name. In 1819, his liberal ideas ultimately resulted in conflict with Chancellor Hardenberg. He resigned from office at the age of 52 to retire to his manor in Tegel, and pursue his pioneering scholarly work in linguistics and philology. Humboldt's publications extend to 17 volumes and include writings on politics, education, philosophy, linguistics and literature, as well as diaries, poems and correspondence. However, he gained fame among the general public (and especially feminine readers) through the letters he wrote, mostly after 1822, to his lady friend Charlotte Diede (1769–1846), with whom he had had a brief platonic love affair in his youth and whom he supported financially for 20 years. In these letters (first published in censored form in 1847 and re-edited in their complete form in 1909 by Albert Leitzmann), Humboldt minutely described the progressive appearance and worsening of symptoms of his illness, now known as Parkinson's disease, including alterations in his handwriting, clumsiness in writing and performing fine movements, weakness, tremulousness, slowness, “inner vibrations of the nerves” distorting the continuity of movement, and curbed posture and gait. He also noted that the symptoms worsened when he was irritated or in a hurry. Cognition and mood were apparently unaffected. Humboldt's self-reports are generally in agreement with the observations of James Parkinson, which were unknown in Germany at the time, and complete them with fine descriptions of micrographia, dysdiadochokinesia, hypokinesia and rigidity. While at the beginning of his illness he attributed his symptoms to premature aging following the death of his wife Caroline von Dacheroden (in 1829), he subsequently came to consider a possible affection of the spinal cord.