Asthma and Human Excellence

Abstract

Superior intelligence, creative genius, extraordinary personality, and/or social prominence have been associated with asthma often enough to raise the question of a nonrandom concurrence. With no intent to prove any developmental correlation, this section of the journal of Asthma presents such “case reports” (more biographical than biological) for two main reasons: to document the experience of asthma in the life of outstanding persons and to make everyone better acquainted—using asthma as an “excuse”—with the work and the times of some unique human beings.

Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg The Serial Music and Serious Asthma of Two Leading 20th-century Composers