MUSIC

A British medical journal is now speculating that 19th-Century violinist Nicolo Paganini, considered the world’s first virtuoso instrumentalist, probably died from mercury poisoning after his doctors prescribed the substance as a cure for syphilis. The master’s cause of death was given in 1840 as tuberculosis, but Paganini probably died because doctors gave him mercury, then the standard cure for syphilis, according to Dr. J. G. O’Shea in an article appearing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.