"Nevertheless, said Goethe, I am in favor of not deviating from the strict requirement of vaccination, since such small exceptions to the obvious benefits of the law are out of the question." Addressee of this von Eckermann on February 19 The statement reported in 1831 was Goethe's last family doctor, the Weimar Hofrat Carl Vogel.

Shortly before, vaccination breakthroughs against smallpox using cowpox had occurred in Eisenach.

Around twenty years earlier, in the first book of "Fiction and Truth", Goethe described his own smallpox illness, which "attacked" him with his younger brother Hermann Jacob - one of five siblings, of whom only the sister Cornelia survived childhood - in the spring of 1758.

However, the highly dangerous vaccination with human smallpox "was still considered to be very problematic among us", and so the disease hit Johann Wolfgang "with very particular violence".

Even though Goethe emphasized that he got off lightly in the end, traces of the disease remained in the form of pockmarks on his face.

The life mask that the Weimar court sculptor Carl Gottlob Weißer took from him bears witness to his long life.

According to Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer's diary, Goethe endured the procedure with covered eyes on October 13, 1807, "for the love" of the Viennese phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall, probably in his presence.

Goethe later confessed to his assistant Friedrich Theodor Kräuter, when he pointed out the mask's serious facial expression: "Do you think it's fun to let the wet stuff rub your face without making a wry face?

It's an art not to look even more surly!" Herbs recalled this in a conversation with Adolf Stahr in July 1851.

Signs of illness in authentic portraits

If the bust, now with open eyes, which Weißer developed from the living mask in 1807/08, was considered particularly lifelike, not without the help of Goethe, who carefully followed the preliminary work in Weißer's studio, the living mask - the only one ever made by Goethe - gave - whose skin surface was meticulously restored, including pockmarks on the chin, left cheek and temples, even if these appear with varying degrees of clarity in the copies that still exist today.

A particularly early copy – still from 1807?

– kept by the Düsseldorf Goethe Museum with the entry in the catalog of the Kippenberg Collection from 1913 (and 1928): “Old cast from Riemer’s possession”.

In the last years of the nineteenth century, the signs of illness on these authentic Goethe portraits attracted particular attention from a visitor to the Goethe Museum in Frankfurt, who was able to see a copy of Goethe's face mask there in the early tenure of its first director, Otto Heuer.

The Breslau ophthalmologist Hermann Ludwig Cohn (1838 to 1906) did not let the Goethe cult of his time prevent him from taking a sober, medical look at the “Olympian”.

A capacity in his subject, Cohn, the father of the writer Emil Ludwig, was a student of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen in Heidelberg in 1860, first in Breslau in chemistry for a Dr.

phil, habilitated in 1868 after studying medicine in Heidelberg, Breslau and Berlin and earning a doctorate (Dr.

medical

Associate professor (unpaid) from 1874 and member of the Leopoldina from 1888, he was unable to rise to the rank of full professor: in the Breslau medical faculty in 1896/97 every third of the fifteen associate professors was of Jewish origin, and among the twelve professors there were only two Jewish scholars , which, however, had been converted.

While he was still alive, Cohn was included in the “Biographical Encyclopedia of Outstanding Doctors of the Nineteenth Century” (Berlin/Vienna 1901), and a generation later even in the “Biographical Encyclopedia of Outstanding Doctors of All Times and Peoples” (Berlin/Vienna 1930).

From 1902 to 1906, Cohn is listed as a Breslau member of the Goethe Society in their yearbooks.