Re: [F_MINOR] Was Glenn Gould really a chain smoker?!?

[Kate Clunies-Ross <appassionata3@LYCOS.COM>]

----- Original Messages -----
 
> 
> > He worried obsessively about his health ... and as a consequence, took
> > so many over-the-counter pills that he pretty much destroyed his
> > health. Death at 50 is usually an indication of poor health habits.
> >
> > /"When Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for ten years." -- Victor Borge/
> >
> > But chainsmoking ... that's also news to me.
  
 So much has been written about GG's lifestyle, habits, and obsession with his health, that I'm sure 
that if he had been a smoker, somebody would have mentioned it, and as far as I know, nobody has. 
Personally, I can't imagine him smoking! He also avoided alcohol, although I believe he said he had 
tried it ... he said it interfered with his thinking, and he wouldnt tolerate anything that affected 
his ability to hink clearly. We all know that he abused prescription drugs, but evidently in his mind 
these were associated with maintaining physical and mental health, so he would have viewed this in a 
different light.

>  Pills, no excercise, an awful diet and hereditary heart > condition killed him.

Actually, this is a presumption; we dont really know this. Ostwald (among others) in his book  
mentiopned Gould's autopsy results. Apparently there was no  sign of real heart disease and in fact 
his heart and arteries were said to be about average for a man of his age (given that he took no 
exercise). Even his blood pressure. although raised, and treated with drugs, was not considered very 
severe. So - hereditary heart condition? Was this really in his family? His mother died of a stroke, 
in her eighties (Not so unusual),  and his father too lived to a good old age (I believe he was in 
his nioneties when he died.
Glenn Gould died of a stroke subsequent to a cavernous sinus thrombosis (itself a rare condition...a 
clot in the area deep under the brain, where large vessels drain the blood from the brain). This is 
sometimes said to be a result of infection, but again, the  autopsy reported that  there was no sign 
of this. But then, as soon as he had been diagnosed, he had been given antibiotics and these _might_ 
have masked the signs of infection. He simply and so sadly  died from the effects of the strokes he 
suffered, and although we know the diagnosis, we will probably never know the  precise cause.

Kate

 
"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake
in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may
act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. "
T. E. Lawrence, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom"  ++

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