This week
is a little off. I’ve been much busier
than normal (I got a job, yay!), and haven’t been able to research as much as I’d
like. Oddly, this means I’m doing a new
topic every week, which winds up being more research ultimately since it’s more
topics, but each entry needs less information so… This week is also weird because it’s not,
strictly speaking, a history topic. When
listening to Sawbones (if you haven’t listened to this podcast go do it right
now), Stendhal Syndrome came up in one of their episodes – I think it was the
fainting episode, given what it is, but I’m not positive on that. It sounded weird and interesting, so I thought
why not? Also, my husband has wanted to read The Red and the Black by Stendhal for a
while now so I’d heard of the guy before.
Briefly on
Stendhal himself. He was born
Marie-Henri Beyle on January 23, 1783 in Grenoble and died March 23, 1842 in
Paris. The Red and the Black is his most well-known novel, but he wrote
six novels, two biographies, a memoir, some nonfiction, and a few
novellas. Stendhal’s works were written in
a realistic style at a time when Romanticism was popular. He used a number of different pseudonyms
before settling on Stendhal. Stendal was
a town in Germany where he stayed near once and where he fell in love; he added
the ‘h’ to make the pronunciation clearer.
In 1817,
Stendhal travelled to Italy and was just in awe of Florence. In his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio, he wrote “As I emerged from the porch of Santa
Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (that same symptom
which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of the nerves); the well-spring
of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the
ground” (1). This description is what
would lead to the condition known as Stendhal Syndrome.
First off, Stendhal Syndrome is not recognized
in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders. Apparently it’s pretty much just a European
thing, heh. Stendhal Syndrome – also known
as Florence Syndrome, hyperkulturemia, and tourist syndrome – is described as “A
psychosomatic response – tachycardia, vertigo, fainting, confusion and even
hallucinations – when the ‘victim’ is exposed to particularly beautiful, or
large amounts of, art in a single place – e.g. Florence (Italy), which has a
high concentration of classic works; the response can also occur when a person
is overwhelmed by breathtaking natural beauty” (2). Stendhal Syndrome can also cause nausea,
paranoia, and even temporary psychosis.
It’s caused by concentrated art, “immense beauty (such as something in
the natural world like a beautiful sunset)” (3), and “most commonly occurs in
tourists who have created stress symptoms by attempting to see and do too much”
(4).
The name Stendhal
Syndrome was coined in 1979 by the Italian psychiatrist Dr. Graziella Magherini
who, at the time, was the chief of psychiatry at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital
in Florence (5). She noticed that an
awful lot of people visiting Florence were coming down with panic attacks or
temporary madness, but not really requiring any medical help. Dr. Magherini remembered having read Stendhal’s
account and coined the condition after him.
In 1989,
Dr. Magherini published La Sindroma di
Stendhal, in which she documented 106 cases at her hospital in Florence
between ’77 and ’86. She broke these
cases down into three different types.
Type 1 had 70 patients who had psychotic symptoms; type 2 had 31
patients with affective symptoms; type 3 had 5 patients with panic attacks (6). Thirty-one percent of the people with type 1
had prior psychiatric history, and over half of the patients in type 2 had. That was pretty much it; not much else has
been written on the condition in academic literature.
In 2005 one
article claimed there was evidence that Dostoevsky suffered from this due to a
description he gave of what happened when he viewed Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ. In 2010 another claimed that Proust, Freud,
and Jung also had it, based on descriptions they gave of similar occurrences. Currently though, a team in Italy is trying
to study tourists’ reactions in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence. If people do suffer from Stendhal Syndrome,
Dr. Magherini has a clinic with beds available for people to rest and recover.
It seems
like Stendhal Syndrome is caused when people are already stressed about travel
and/or have been looking forward to seeing a particular thing for a long time. Basically, you’re just extremely overwhelmed
or overcome by the beauty of what they’re seeing. It’s not actually the place, but our
expectations or exhaustion before getting to the place. It’s most common in Italy, but it seems that
Italians are immune, presumably because they live among these things. The Japanese don’t get it either, due to
their “hit-and-run, highly regimented tourism” (7).
So, how can
you prevent getting Stendhal Syndrome?
Experts advise trying not to do too much at once (again, especially in
Italy) and balancing your time between art and other activities (8). Beware though, there are other Syndromes you
could still get. There’s: Paris
Syndrome, from taking in too much culture at once; Jerusalem Syndrome, from
taking in too much religion/religious sites at once; and Rubens Syndrome “for
erotically charged activity to break out after, or even during, viewings of Old
Masters, particularly those depicting a figurative romp” (9). The Rubens one has actually been studied too;
of the 2000 people that were observed or talked to, 20% had “begun ‘an erotic
adventure’ in a museum” (10) (for someone who works in museums… Um… Please don’t…).
So that’s
the weird case (and so a weird entry today) of Stendhal Syndrome. I think it’s really neat but weird and crazy
and I’m curious what other weird medical things there are like this! When you look at the Wikipedia page for
Stendhal Syndrome it also suggests Lisztomania, Paris Syndrome, and Jerusalem
Syndrome; Lisztomania was just done on Stuff You Missed in History Class, but I
may have to look at the other two a bit more, or see what the Liszt page might
tell me to look at. Crazy stuff!
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