Posted on 07/19/2004 10:40:39 PM PDT by MadIvan
For decades it was no more than a whispered rumour in the corridors of Soviet medicine but now a team of doctors claim to have proved that Lenin, communism's greatest icon, died of syphilis.
Israeli doctors, writing in the European Journal of Neurology, say they used medical records pieced together from archives released after the fall of communism to reconstruct the first Soviet leader's illness and death.
The team says Lenin's syphilis caused brain damage and later dementia in the last two years of his life. It came at a crucial time for the Soviet Union, when Stalin was plotting his takeover.
The basis of the disclosures are medical charts, results of a post mortem examination and memoirs from physicians who treated Lenin and were sworn to secrecy after he died in 1924.
Officially, Lenin died of arteriosclerosis, but only eight of 27 doctors who treated him were willing to put their names to the death certificate. Among those who refused to sign were his two personal doctors.
The diagnosis of syphilis was particularly problematic in the 19th and early 20th century as the disease often mimics other brain disorders.
But the discovery that a committee of Soviet doctors prescribed the medicine Salvarsan, an arsenic-based treatment with horribly painful side-effects that is used only to treat syphilis, was a strong indication that his doctors knew the true nature of his disease.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
Time for the monty python STD song...
Just like Friedrich Nietzsche.
Ahh, how nice. Put that one down with Trotsky: ice pick in the back of the head. F*$%^in commies.
Poetic justice indeed.
Quite frankly, I don't care how he died. I am just glad that he is gone and that communism is on the down fall. But I fear that European Socialism is on the rise and we must do everything to see that it is buried in the history books with Lenin.
Ohh....please giv-us a link...or a quote, M'm.
(I assume you're a M'm)
There is much similarity between Nietzche and Marx, both were utterly obsessed, wrote endlessly, lived in abject poverty; Marx let his children be taken away to be cared for by the state. Nietzche never had a relationship and tried his best to destroy his only friend Wagner. What we read took his sister and seven editors many years to put together. It's meaningless drivel.
Nietzche died in an asylum. Marx neglected his family, it has been said his children were so malnourished they were at the point of starvation...while he maintained that people who went to work were nothing but 'wage slaves'.
Freud was a cocaine addict. A fraud who never cured a single patient, the most famous of which, Anna O, was discovered in an asylum many years after he maintained she was his greatest success...
Muhammad suffered from epilepsy, he had numerous schizoid episodes. The list is long. Either syphilis, mental illness or drugs marks them all.
I am not an m&m, plain or peanut.
The medical love song:
http://www.letssingit.com/?http://www.letssingit.com/monty-python-monty-python-sings-xjxpp.html
Quite frankly, I don't care how he died. I am just glad that he is gone and that communism is on the down fall. ""
Lenin dying when he did was BAD, and him not being in a position to keep stalin out of power was BAD. I have read (who knows what is true from events in russia 80 years ago) that lenin's posthumous manifesto was suppressed because it called for stalin to be removed from position of control.
even compared to run-of-the-mill socialism/communism, Josef Stalin was a REALLY bad guy. His rise to power arguably altered the course of western history. he is another clear example of how psychiatric stability is in no way a prerequisite for ascension to power.
Well, there goes the theory that Stalin had him murdered.
Hilarious! That motto probably supports general idiocy, but probably not paresis. (g!)
I'm not saying that Stalin was good or anything like that. On the contrary, he was an evil man who committed unthinkable acts.
However, there is something to ponder. Had Lenin lived longer and Stalin been kept out of power, would communism still have a strangle hold on much of the world, and could it have even expanded? Stalin helped the world to see the evils of Communism, which eventually led to its downfall. I'm not saying it was a good thing. But was it necessary? I guess there is no way of knowing. Just something to think about.
Stalin was bad but there was no way he would have come to power had Lenin not led the revolution in the first place. Lenin was not a good man.
Points taken, and I agree and don't know whether the historical outcome or one of the obvious alternates (especially given ww2) would have been preferable. thanks for replying.
Friedrich Nietzsche had congenital syphilis, which he got from his father.
Translation: "SERVING THE PEOPLE!"
Hmmmm, I wonder if Hitler had herpes!
Might explain that little growth on his upper lip! ;-)
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