Édouard Manet died in Paris on 30 April 1883, aged 51, ten days after surgeons cut off his left leg below the knee. Gangrene had set in. Behind it lay years of locomotor ataxia, a nerve disease usually blamed on syphilis.
The gangrene began as a black spot on his left foot. By then he had spent about three years in constant pain, mostly in a chair.
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The textbook answer is syphilis. Manet was told something else. A physician assured him that his illness had nothing to do with that disease, and the treatment that followed may have hastened the gangrene.
Manet was not a forgotten man dying in obscurity: the Salon had given him a medal in 1881, and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère hung there in 1882. What failed him was medicine. The diagnosis, the drugs and the cures all reached him from doctors who disagreed with one another.
I would not repeat the syphilis answer as settled. A medical review of his case calls it likely, but by no means certain, and the review names no better candidate.
Who told Manet it was not syphilis?
Professor Pierre Potain, according to a medical review of Manet's last illness published by Hektoen International. Potain told him that his ataxia was not due to syphilis and prescribed ergot derivatives. The review gives no date.
The trouble had started in the fall of 1879. Leaving his studio, Manet felt a sudden pain in his back, his legs gave way, and he fell on the pavement. A physician sent him to a thermal cure of showers and massages. It did not help, and Manet found it a torture.
Bitter about the doctors who could not cure him, he said they looked like undertakers.
Tabes dorsalis, the late form of neurosyphilis, remains the likeliest explanation. The germ of syphilis was identified only after 1905, so no doctor at his bedside could have tested for it. They judged by symptoms, and Manet had a professor's word that this was something else.
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