Wilhelm’s Illness and Last Years

Abstract

In youth and early manhood, Wilhelm had been physically very fit. His father had encouraged him in athletic pursuits when he was a child, and geodetic field-work had preserved the health of the mature man. After the childhood diseases, Otto wrote, Wilhelm had no illness except for occasional trouble with a tapeworm.¹ After Wilhelm returned from his visit abroad in 1853, however, the preparation of Arc du Méridien for publication took all his energy, and his way of life became quite sedentary. By this stage of his life, Wilhelm had become a chain-smoker of cigars --his average was fifteen a day and he came to need a cigar in his mouth almost all the time.² At first, journeys into St Petersburg for administrative duties and meetings of the Academy at least provided Wilhelm with much-needed fresh air and mental rest, but in January 1855 Paul von Fuss died and Wilhelm even cut down the number of these journeys and

…attended sessions of the Academy only quite by exception. What contributed to this circumstance was the fact that, because of conflict of interest, a mood inimical to the Central Observatory had been developing since 1848 among the members of the Academy, which, however, came to light only after the death of Fuss.³