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.
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