Axel Munthe received a degree in medicine and philosophy from Uppsala University in 1876. He was then 19 years old. After graduating he travelled south because of his poor health – he is believed to have had tuberculosis (or consumption as it was then called), which would bother him for a long time – and visited Capri for the first time. Afterwards he studied with the then well-known gynaecologist Amadée Courty in Montpellier, France, and received his doctorate in medicine in 1880 in Paris with a dissertation about uterine bleeding during birth.
Dr Axel Munthe’s defence of his dissertation was controversial. The period for opposition was extended due to his arrogant behaviour and because many of his sources were German, which irritated the French authorities. Munthe was thus initially a gynaecologist but worked as a general practitioner throughout his professional life. Later on, an interest in psychological problems came to dominate.
Friend of the poor
Munthe worked as a volunteer physician during the typhus epidemic on Capri in 1881, during the cholera epidemic in Naples in 1884, and for the British Red Cross during World War I. He was an artistic figure who played the piano and sang; he had a broad interest in culture and later on became one of the most widely read Swedish writers internationally. He also seems to have taken an artistic view of his work. He regarded his role as a physician as a calling and so he often worked for free; he was just doing his duty. But he was probably also a careerist who first failed in Paris and then vindicated himself in Rome.
Like many other physicians who served a neurotic upper class, Munthe became something of a therapist with the ability to inspire hope, but also with great power over his patients. Hypnotism gave Munthe an even more dominant position over his patients. It was only under his direction that the patients could become healthy, which made them totally dependence on his presence. Munthe’s close familiarity with his patients was also due to the social interplay within the aristocracy.
Contacts and personal relationships were an important career path. In addition, the role of a society physician also included being a spiritual conversation partner and guest. This naturally strengthened patients’ trust in the physician, which was presumably a good starting point for issues related to psychological or psychosomatic illnesses.
When Axel Munthe received his doctorate in medicine in Paris he was only 22 years old, and was thereby the youngest holder of the degree ever in France at that time. He then had a practice in Paris during the 1880s. He mostly worked for the Scandinavian artists’ colony in Paris. He was not very successful, least of all financially, which initially would also be a problem in Rome. But the social circle in which he moved turned him into a public figure both in France and in Sweden, where the Swedish press wrote about the life of artists in Paris.
Munthe made several trips to Capri and to the Alps. In 1884 he also travelled to Naples, where he observed the cholera epidemic, counted the number of the infected and the dead, and wrote articles about these experiences that were published in the Swedish newspaper Stockholms Dagblad. In 1888 he settled down for the first time on Capri and became a village doctor for the poor islanders, who often could not pay for treatment. However, Munthe was given almost saint-like status on the island. He was glad to be out of Paris and enjoyed Capri and his work there. The artists in Paris had not always paid either, but Munthe’s big problem during this first residency on Capri was (as always) his financial situation.
His desire to make a career among the upper class in Rome can well have been to give himself some financial stability – but perhaps it was also about validation – while at the same time he longed to withdraw to Capri and treat the simple people there for free.
In 1890 Munthe opened a practice near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In the following year he established himself by attracting ministers, lords and diplomats to his surgery, above all the English and the Americans. In 1891 Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden and Norway became Munthe’s patient, but despite this his financial problems continued. It was very expensive for Munthe to live as a society physician. He had to hire his own carriage, dress expensively, and have his surgery at a fancy address.
As usual, everything was financed by Munthe’s good friend, the Norwegian diplomat Georg Sibbern. During the 1890s Munthe had a spectacular career in Rome but he never forgot his mission as a doctor for the poor. Together with other people he collected donations for soup kitchens, orphanages and children’s clinics.
