During 1855 alone they had had no fewer than twenty-eight patients with
that illness. Trier had furthermore written the first Danish textbook on the
use of the stethoscope—Indications for the Recognition of Diseases of the Lungs
and Heart—so it is unlikely that a typical tuberculosis case would have
slipped by. Neither was there anything in the course of the illness that would
lead a person to suspect syphilis, even though some accounts mentioned
“spinal consumption,” which can be a symptom of syphilis. Modern medi-
cal investigations have advanced the claim that it was a case of a progressive
neurological disease called ascending spinal paralysis or acute ascending po-
lyradiculitis or Guillain-Barre ́syndrome, of unknown etiology, but in
which allergic mechanisms appear to play some role.
“And when you get right down to it,” Kierkegaard had written in 1846,
“what do the physiologist and the physician really know, then?” Well, in
any case, they did not know what Kierkegaard died of. That he died of a
“longing for eternity,” as he himself had prophesied inThe Point of View,
is of course not a clinically tenable diagnosis, but it is scarcely the worst
explanation.
A Little Corpse with Nowhere to Go
Throughout his life, Peter Christian Kierkegaard always had to consider
things again and yet again, and so it was not he, butFlyve-PostenandKjøben-
havnspostenthat broke the news of his younger brother’s death, publishing
cautious, lenient, almost indulgent obituaries of the man who had made
war on the church. But three days later, Friday, November 16, 1855, one
could read the following announcement in the morning supplement toBer-
lingske Tidende: “On the evening of Sunday, the eleventh of this month,
after an illness of six weeks, Dr.Søren Aabye Kierkegaardwas taken from this
earthly life, in his forty-third year, by a calm death, which hereby is sorrow-
fully announced on his own behalf and on behalf of the rest of the family
by his brother / P. Chr. Kierkegaard.”
During the ensuing week this was followed by obituaries great and small.
Kierkegaard’s preferred organ,Fædrelandet, carried a very brief, but on the
other hand quite uncritical notice concerning “Denmark’s greatest religious
writer,” while the National Liberal paperDagbladetran the most beautiful
of all the obituaries, which not only said nothing of Kierkegaard’s imperfec-
tions and his one-sidedness, but also emphasized his vital significance for
the times and for posterity. “Kierkegaard will assume a prominent place in
Danish history, in the history of literature, and in the history of the
Church,” the newspaper wrote, as it added Kierkegaard’s name to the series