Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

One of the mysteries of the celebrities of the 19th century is why the wife of the famed Irish writer Oscar Wilde died at such a young age, and what was her affliction. Constance Wilde spent much of her life with a strange illness that doctor's couldn't diagnose. A medical journal, The Lancet, published earlier this month (Jan. 2) purports that she most likely suffered from Multiple Sclerosis.

Based on letters that were unpublished in the past, medical experts figured out why the famed playwright's wife died at the young age of 40. She died 116 years ago and lived in Italy with her two sons, changing her name to Holland. She was running away from her bisexual husband's scandal and imprisonment for homosexual acts in England in 1895.

Wilde's death himself was laced in scandal, and the same medical journal looked at his terminal illness, but his wife's death was surrounded more in mystery. Some answers cropped up in letters from the couple's grandson, Merlin Holland. Constance was born on Jan. 2 in 1858 and married Oscar in 1884. They had two children in 1885 and 1886, and he was notorious for his dalliances with men, which he was finally convicted for in 1895. Throughout the last 10 years of her life, she had neurological problems and complained about them in her letters.

Constance was a journalist in her day and wrote two children's books. She also published some of Oscar's work and was a political activist in her day. She championed women's rights, liberal issues and remained very active until she started experience a slow-down and intense fatigue. Her symptoms included a heavy right leg that she had trouble lifting, which eventually led to her walking with a cane, and severe tingling and pain in her head and back.

"I am alright when I don't walk, but then I can't go thro' life sitting on a chair especially with two boys to amuse," she wrote in one of her letters. Then, she slowed down even more and wrote in 1896, "I am tired of doctors and no doctor finding out what to do with me."

Her face experienced paralysis. In the end, she had extreme fatigue which completely baffled her doctors. Historian Ashley Robins, of the University of Cape Town Medical School in South Africa, looked at medical documents and letters that he could uncover and found neurological symptoms that were similar to Multiple Sclerosis. Of course, there was no diagnosis for the http://www.capegynaecologist.co.za/