Van Gogh's disease in the light of his correspondence

The literary quality of Vincent van Gogh's correspondence is widely recognized. He wrote expressively and evocatively, and had great literary knowledge. In this essay we follow his medical history in many quotes from in his letters to see how Vincent expressed his complaints, knowledge, and emotions connected with his disease. The symptoms became most clear after December 1888. In the beginning, Van Gogh hesitated to tell much about his ailment, but gradually painted in the letters his experiences, making use of the intermittent course of his cycloid psychoses. We will see an indication that, in the network that mediated Van Gogh's brain (dys)function, elements of synesthesia, prosopagnosia, and spatial agnosia might have been activated. Van Gogh's affinity for poetry, already in his early twenty's, makes the hypothesis of a, by epileptic discharges, kindled temporal lobe at most only part of the complex interpretation of this creative and suffering mind.