Cancer and the arts: Johannes Brahms and the problem of pancreatic carcinoma

‘Pancreatic cancer kills patients—and it still exhausts their doctors’, an oncologists told me once. ‘Pancreatic cancer is associated with a very poor prognosis, highlighted by the close parallel between disease incidence and mortality. Five-year survival in patients with pancreatic cancer remains as low as 6% in the USA’, Terumi Kamisawa et al 1 wrote in The Lancet. Only recently Cancer Research UK announced that its spending on pancreatic cancer research has tripled from £6 million (€7.2 million) in 2013/2014 to £18 million (€21.6 million) in 2015/2016. Only one in every 100 patients with pancreatic cancer in England and Wales survive their disease for more than 10 years and this has stayed the same since the 1970s. Only 21% of the cases are diagnosed at stage I/II.2Vienna is the city of music. No wonder that members of the Viennese medical school have always paid interest in the medical fate of musicians, composers and directors. One of them was the composer Johannes Brahms (born 7 May 1833, Hamburg; died 3 April 1897, Vienna). He had started his career in Germany where he also came into close contact with Clara Schumann, pianist and wife of composer Robert Schumann. After some time in Detmold in Germany as conductor of a local choir and a piano teacher in Hamburg he moved to Vienna in 1872 where he became famous for his skills as a piano virtuoso, and …