Presumably Acton meant Gian Gastone when, talking about the Medici portraits in the preface, he talks about it all culminating in "a terrible senile lust".
Also older brother Ferdinando! Though not a reigning duke, he was one of the final Medici, and he died insane from syphilis. Gian Gastone would like you to know that even if his brain was often severely impaired by alcohol abuse, he remained compos mentis until his dying hour. No senility for him.
Though the House of Bourbon still would like you to know it's unfair to blame this on them.
(Have now found 3 consecutive Spanish Bourbon kings who were faithful to their wives, although I'm admittedly not *sure* Ferdinand VI was.)
Speaking of Ferdinand VI, he who may have inherited mental illness from his father Philip V, this is from Spanish wiki:
He had great fears of dying or drowning and was abandoning business and hunting. [...] The last document he signed is one month after the death of his wife and the king's last dispatch with Minister Wall was in early October 1758, "standing and talking." [...] The king stopped talking, and was reducing his meals to the point that he was not eating. Manias made an appearance, and shortly afterward, he locked himself in a room where there was little room for a bed, where he spent his last months.
During that time he was aggressive - "he has very strong impulses to bite everyone," wrote the infant Luis to his mother Isabel de Farnesio - and to calm him they gave him opium; he tried to commit suicide on several occasions and asked the doctors for poison or firearms from members of the royal guard; He danced and ran in his underwear, pretended to be dead or, wrapped in a sheet, a ghost. Every day he was thinner and paler, which was added to the laziness in his personal hygiene. He did not sleep on the bed but on two chairs and a stool.
Other than the bipolar hypothesis, Wikipedia tells me the other speculative diagnosis is right frontal lobe syndrome, with epileptic seizures.
So if the Spanish Bourbons and Italian Medici of the 18th century had anything in common, it was cases of mental illness and neurological deterioration, but neither seems to be inheriting theirs from the French Bourbons!
Re: Harold Acton: Last of the Medici I: How to make really bad marriages
Also older brother Ferdinando! Though not a reigning duke, he was one of the final Medici, and he died insane from syphilis. Gian Gastone would like you to know that even if his brain was often severely impaired by alcohol abuse, he remained compos mentis until his dying hour. No senility for him.
Though the House of Bourbon still would like you to know it's unfair to blame this on them.
(Have now found 3 consecutive Spanish Bourbon kings who were faithful to their wives, although I'm admittedly not *sure* Ferdinand VI was.)
Speaking of Ferdinand VI, he who may have inherited mental illness from his father Philip V, this is from Spanish wiki:
He had great fears of dying or drowning and was abandoning business and hunting. [...] The last document he signed is one month after the death of his wife and the king's last dispatch with Minister Wall was in early October 1758, "standing and talking." [...] The king stopped talking, and was reducing his meals to the point that he was not eating. Manias made an appearance, and shortly afterward, he locked himself in a room where there was little room for a bed, where he spent his last months.
During that time he was aggressive - "he has very strong impulses to bite everyone," wrote the infant Luis to his mother Isabel de Farnesio - and to calm him they gave him opium; he tried to commit suicide on several occasions and asked the doctors for poison or firearms from members of the royal guard; He danced and ran in his underwear, pretended to be dead or, wrapped in a sheet, a ghost. Every day he was thinner and paler, which was added to the laziness in his personal hygiene. He did not sleep on the bed but on two chairs and a stool.
Other than the bipolar hypothesis, Wikipedia tells me the other speculative diagnosis is right frontal lobe syndrome, with epileptic seizures.
So if the Spanish Bourbons and Italian Medici of the 18th century had anything in common, it was cases of mental illness and neurological deterioration, but neither seems to be inheriting theirs from the French Bourbons!