Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 47: Date of Karen Blixen's syphilis?

Q. I watched a TV show the other night that said that Bror couldn´t have given syphilis to Karen. They said the timing of his safari sessions and her being ill just didn´t match up. I wonder if you could come up with the answer...?

A. Karen Blixen visited Bror Blixen at his army camp in September 1914, during the early months of the East African campaign. She did sleep with Bror in his army tent, as she describes in her "Letters from Africa," but it is unlikely that she was infected at this time.

She appears to have been infected when Bror returned to their farm, in November 1914, after the volunteer troops were disbanded. Bror had spent some nights in Masai homes during a forced march. At that time there was syphilis among the Masai, introduced by early white men in East Africa.

Karen Blixen could have been infected at any time during a period of three months. Her own illness seems to have begun, after a period of incubation, in January or February of 1915. It was at this time that she took an overdose of sleeping tablets--which has all the appearances of a suicide attempt. She left East Africa in April to seek treatment in Europe.

The course of syphilis can be indolent over several weeks. It starts with a chancre--a sore--that is contagious. A few weeks later the victim comes down with a fever, rash, and sores on the skin and mucous membranes (mouth and sexual organs). In the era of Karen Blixen's illness, it was not known that, once the victim recovers, he or she is usually immune--as with diseases like measles or mumps. At least two-thirds of those who get syphilis recover without later problems. The remaining group may develop dementia, or aortic aneurysm, but not until many years later.

Various stories have excluded Bror Blixen from the above possibilities, but none of these stories has a medical or scientific basis. Victims who have what is called "latent syphilis" can sometimes communicate the disease four years after they are first ill. Still, two-thirds of these recover completely.

See also: Where did Karen Blixen get syphilis? and Karen Blixen's Medical History: A New Look
 

Copyright © 2001 by Linda Donelson MD. All rights reserved