“Given the situation, just in case, I must not neglect to inquire whether
you have the deed to the family burial plot, or if you know where it is.”
Sunday, November 11, was Kierkegaard’s final day. He now lay in a
completely unconscious, comatose state. His pulse was slow, his breathing
was heavy and abbreviated. He was gradually suffocating, just like Socrates,
when the hemlock approached his heart. Death came at nine in the evening.
Twelve hours later, when the pale winter sun rose, he was transferred to
the hospital morgue.
Postmortem
“The doctors do not understand my illness. It is psychical, and now they
want to treat it in the usual medical fashion,” Kierkegaard had remarked
during one of his first hospital conversations with Boesen. But he was not
treated entirely in the usual medical fashion: No autopsy was performed,
presumably because he had been opposed to having himself cut up into
pieces. A number of students at the medical faculty were unhappy about
Kierkegaard’s decision. They had wanted to get their hands on his brain
and had spoken passionately on behalf of science, but to no avail. Others
also directed their attention to this abnormal organ. As Peter Christian Zahle
wrote, “Perhaps an all-too-strenuous use of the brain had damaged the spi-
nal meninges, thereby paralyzing the lower body.” And only a day after
Kierkegaard’s death, Paulli had said to one of his friends, “He was said to
have suffered from a softness of the brain. Was this responsible for his writ-
ings, or were the writings responsible for it?”
Paulli’s question was almost as good as the brain had been brilliant, but
since no autopsy was performed on Kierkegaard, there is no pathology data
to help answer the question. Kierkegaard’s hospital journal is bound to-
gether with those of sixty-nine other patients who left department A in one
way or another in November 1855. Symbolically, Kierkegaard’s journal is
the last one in the book. The first page of Kierkegaard’s journal has a prelim-
inary suggested diagnosis of “hemiplegia,” but it has been crossed out.
Hemiplegia is an immobility on one side of the body. The final diagnosis
is “paralysis”—that is, total immobility—but this is a description of a symp-
tom and not a real etiological diagnosis. Therefore someone added, in pa-
rentheses, “tuberculosis?”
The question mark indicates that they were confronted with an illness
with which they were not familiar. It resembled tuberculosis but was none-
theless something else, and the medical people at Seligmann Meyer Trier’s
department were those best equipped to know that it was not tuberculosis.