THE CRAZY ROMANOFFS.

Auckland Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 273, 19 November 1887, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE CRAZY ROMANOFFS.

A Disease Which Afflicts the Russian

Imperial Family.

In the recently published memoirs of Count Vitzthum of Eckstadt, proofs are given of the hereditary character of the mental diseases which afflicted the imperial family of Russia. All the sons of Czar Paul 1., like that unhappy monarch himself, who was murdered in 1801, became Bubjects to fits of insanity. Paul I. bad four sons— Czar Alexander I. the Grand Duke Constantino, Czar Nicolas I and the Grand duke Michael. Every one of them after his fortyfifth year exhibited undoubted signs of mental derangement. This was hot fully discovered in the case of Nicolas I, until after the Czar's death. An English physician, however, the Count'says, noticed the appearance of the hereditary disease in the Czar as early as July, 1853, and he then predicted that the monarch had not more than two years of life before him. This he stated in a letter to Lord Palmerston. The Emperor Nicolas died in March, 1885, about four months earlier than the date predicted. The Count appears to have no doubt that the Crimean war, so far as it depended on Nicolas, was the rash act of a ruler "whose mental equipose was disturbed." None of the four sons of Paul I. lived to be 60 years of age, and every one of them suffered from concussion of the brain after reaching his fortyfifth year. Alexander died at 48, a miserable man, moody and despondent, as Prince Metiernich has painted him, "tired of existence." His brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, though not manifestly insane, gave frequent signs of mental disturbance, of which he was himself so plainly conscious that he did not think himself fit to be trusted with the reins of government. His conduct in the year 1830, ab the outbreak of the revolution in Warsaw, will remains to prove his mental unsoundness. He had to be intrusted to the care of his wife, the Princess Lowiez, who was cautioned the same way as if a physician in charge of a patient having intermittent fits of insanity. He died in his fifty-second year from congestion of the brain. The Grand Duke Michael was killed by a fall from his horse at the age of 48. Some years before his death he had exhibited signs of undoubted mental disease, and his physicians declared that he was on the road to certain insanity. The events of 1848-52 were not calculated to allay the hereditary dispositions of the imperial family of Russia, but to excite and intensify them. There is something terrible in the contrast between the outward position of the Czar Nicolas. upon the bent of whose -w-ill the fate of millions in Europe was depending, and the alleged diseased inward condition of his mind.