Legendary German composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach suffered from weak eyesight for much of his life. His handwriting—beautiful in his youth—became increasingly shaky and sometimes difficult to read, likely reflecting vision problems. As he grew older, his condition worsened, and he eventually developed cataracts. In the final year of his life, Bach’s vision declined so severely that he agreed to undergo surgery. A traveling English eye surgeon, John Taylor, performed two operations on him, both with disastrous results. Bach lost his sight completely, and his eyes became painful. He died less than four months after the second operation. In Bach’s time, eye surgeries were crude and the chances of recovery slim, but in his case, death owed more to the incompetence of John Taylor than to the limitations of contemporary medicine.
A 1748 portrait of Bach by Elias Gottlob Haussmann.
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 in Eisenach to a family whose members had served as town musicians, organists, and composers for many generations. His father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was the town musician and taught him the basics of violin and music theory, while one of his uncles may have introduced him to the organ.
Bach lost both his parents when he was ten, after which he moved to Ohrdruf to live with his elder brother, Johann Christoph Bach, an organist and pupil of the great composer Johann Pachelbel. There, he received training in keyboard instruments, studied composition, and had access to a well-stocked music library. Eager to learn more than his brother permitted, Bach secretly copied manuscripts by moonlight. These nocturnal labors put enormous strain on the young Bach’s eyes—a weakness that would trouble him for the rest of his life.
Bach reportedly had “naturally bad vision,” which was further aggravated “by a lot of studying, sometimes even all night long, especially during his youth.” Some scholars believe he may have been myopic. Evidence for this comes from his 1748 portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, which shows “the vertical furrows running upward from the bridge of the nose as well as the narrowed eyes, the result of myopia.” However, other refractive errors such as hyperopia or astigmatism can also cause narrowing of the eyelids.
The fact that Bach was able to continue playing the organ suggests that his myopia might have been mild, with a refractive error no greater than –2.00 D. However, his eyesight deteriorated as he grew older, with the most likely explanation being cataracts.
A mid-18th century sketch showing the procedure of couching.
During the last year of his life, Bach’s vision became so poor that, persuaded by his friends, he decided to consult a physician. That year, a traveling ophthalmologist named John Taylor happened to be in Leipzig. Bach went to see him; Taylor confirmed cataracts in both eyes and recommended a painful surgical procedure known as couching.
In this procedure, a sharp needle was passed through the cornea to push the clouded lens to the back of the eye, which often restored some vision. Unlike modern cataract surgery, where the lens is removed and replaced with an artificial one, couching simply displaced the opaque lens so it no longer blocked light from reaching the retina. Couching was an ancient technique, first mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC) and described in detail in the Indian medical treatise Sushruta Samhita (c. 600 BCE). In Bach’s time, it remained the only available treatment for cataracts.
Unfortunately for Bach, John Taylor was far from the greatest of surgeons. Although he had trained at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London under the pioneering British surgeon William Cheselden, Taylor lacked the finesse of his master and relied more on showmanship than on expertise to attract patients. He styled himself an “ophthalmiater”—a word he coined from the Greek for eye and physician. He travelled in a coach painted all over with eyes and inscribed with the motto qui dat videre dat vivere (“giving sight is giving life”).
Taylor toured widely across Europe and beyond—to Russia and Persia—where even kings and emperors were among his patients. He was appointed oculist to King George II and to many European courts, though in places where his results proved less successful, he was sometimes banished. Taylor left behind a trail of suffering wherever he went. By his own admission, he blinded hundreds of patients.
John Taylor
Yet Taylor was not without knowledge. He wrote scientific articles in several languages, and his writings reveal anatomical insight equal to, and in some cases surpassing, that of his contemporaries. He was the first to describe keratoconus, which he illustrated recognizably, and in advocating a surgical approach to strabismus by cutting an eye muscle, he was ahead of his time. This made Taylor a rare combination of a man of genuine scientific understanding and a charlatan in daily practice.
Taylor performed the first operation on Bach between March 28 and 31, 1750. According to newspaper accounts, Bach’s vision improved after the first operation. However, Taylor had significant influence with the newspapers of the time, because of the money he spent advertising his arrival in the towns that he visited and the miraculous operations that he performed.
About a week later, Bach had to undergo a second operation due to a recurrence of the cataract. What exactly took place during these procedures will never be known, but Taylor’s methods were generally destructive. In addition to the usual bloodletting, he administered laxatives and applied eye drops made from pigeon’s blood, pulverized sugar, or baked salt. To treat inflammation, he prescribed large doses of mercury.
It is unclear whether Taylor operated on both eyes or only one. The fact that Bach went completely blind in both eyes afterward suggests that both were operated on, though it is also possible that one eye had already been blind, or nearly so, before the surgeries.
Bach never recovered after these operations. A few days before his death, some accounts report a sudden return of vision, though others believe this was a hallucination. Soon after, he suffered an apoplectic fit and a fever. He died on July 28, 1750.
Portrait of Georg Friedrich Händel
Not long after Bach’s death, the great composer George Frideric Handel began to experience failing eyesight. In 1751 he consulted Samuel Sharp, who, like Taylor, had been a pupil of the British surgeon William Cheselden. Sharp, a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, was interested in cataracts. In 1740 he had suggested an improvement on Cheselden’s iridotomy and in 1753 would publish a new method of extracting the lens. In Handel’s case, however, Sharp apparently found no evidence of cataract. His contemporary Hawkins wrote that Handel “was alarmed by a disorder in his eyes which, upon consulting with Mr. Samuel Sharp, Surgeon of Guy’s Hospital, he was told was an incipient gutta serena.”
Despite Sharp’s diagnosis, Handel underwent couching in 1752, performed by William Bromfield, a surgeon at St. George’s and the Lock Hospitals. Something catastrophic must have occurred, for a report states that Handel was seized “with a paralytick disorder in his head, which has deprived him of sight.”
At first, after the operation, Handel’s sight improved, but the success was short-lived. He gradually began to lose his vision again, although he continued to conduct, play the organ, and revise his older works with the help of a pupil.
In 1758, Taylor saw Handel and appears to have operated on him, though the evidence for this is flimsy. An anonymous poem titled On the Recovery of the Sight of the Celebrated Mr. Handel, by the Chevalier Taylor, published in the London Chronicle on 24 August 1758, together with Taylor’s own claim in his autobiography, seems to be the only testimony that he performed the surgery.
In any case, Handel’s sight was not restored, though he continued to conduct. On 6 April 1759, he collapsed, and after a week of alternating coma and consciousness, he died during the night of 13–14 April.
Little is known of Taylor’s life after 1761, when his autobiography was published. The music historian Charles Burney claimed Taylor died on 16 November 1770 in Rome, adding that he had “dined with him at my table d’hôte a few days before his death.” Others maintain he died in Paris, while newspapers in Germany and England reported that he had recently died at a convent in Prague in 1772. He was, by then, reportedly completely blind.
References:
# Richard H. C. Zegers. “The Eyes of Johann Sebastian Bach”. Ophthalmology, Vol. 123, No. 10
# Heidi Harralson, Clare Kaufman, Martin Jarvis. “Handwriting and Visual Impairment: A Forensic Analysis of J. S. Bach's Signatures”. Drawing, Handwriting Processing Analysis
# David M. Jackson. “Bach, Handel, and The Chevalier Taylor”. Medical History , Volume 12 , Issue 4
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