Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings October 2017 - 487

left the literature. No man ever had so great an impact on the
written tone. He had the creative gift of appealing strongly to a
great number of people then and now. He is in a class by himself
and a class joined by no one until Shakespeare. He was, and is,
read for enjoyment. Over 80 complete manuscripts by Chaucer
have survived out of many hundreds-perhaps over 1000-all
published in the 15th century. When printing came to England,
the Canterbury Tales was published, and it has been in print for
520 years. Even today it is one of the texts that teenagers begin
in compulsion but ﬁnish in delight. And Chaucer has attracted
a body of commentary and elucidation over the centuries, rivaled only by Shakespeare. His poems all together occupy many
thousands of lines. Chaucer had a vocabulary of 8000 words,
and he added over 1000 words to the English language.
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528): Never a day passed without
Dürer creating something, even when he was traveling. Dürer
discovered that watercolors are perfect for a traveling artist, light
to carry, easy to set up, and ideally suited for a quick landscape
or town sketch while there was half an hour to spare. Dürer's
initiative in adopting the new medium-watercolor-so he could
record his travels and never waste a day was characteristic both of
his intense unremitting industry and of his voracious appetite for
new artistic experiences. His output included 346 woodcuts; 105
engravings; scores of portraits in various media; several massive
altar pieces; etchings and drypoints; and 970 surviving drawings
(of many thousands). Virtually all his work is of the highest possible quality, and he seemed to work at the limit of his capacities
all his life. He pushed the frontiers of art forward. The number
of ﬁrsts he scored in technical innovation is striking.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Johnson called
Shakespeare the most creative personality in human history.
Shakespeare was an inventor of English words on a scale without
rivalry. Depending on the method of calculating, Shakespeare
coined 2076 words by one method and about 6700 by another.
There were 150,000 English words in his day, of which he used
about 20,000, so his coinages were up to 10% of his vocabulary-amazing. He took some words out of the common stock
of speech and baptized them in print, creating words by turning
nouns into verbs and vice versa or by adding suﬃxes. There are
322 words that only Shakespeare ever used.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): According to Johnson,
Bach is the best example in our civilization of the importance of
heredity or genes in the development of creativity. There were at
least 85 members of the family, most of whom were musicians.
Although Bach was in continuous musical practice, he was hardly
what we would now call a "celebrity." He insisted on the highest
standards for himself and others. He had strong religious beliefs and
great moral probity and felt that music was one way of speaking to
and serving God. Only nine of his signiﬁcant works were published
in his lifetime. Unlike any other composer in history, Bach wrote
examples (often in formidable numbers) of every type of music
then known, with the exception of opera, usually adding new
dimensions by experimenting with fresh combinations of instruments or pushing the technical frontiers. He produced something
new virtually every week of his life! Like Dürer, Bach composed
even when traveling. He wrote music in his head, memorized it,
October 2017

and only afterward tried it out on the keyboard. He tended to
write for an immediate performance, as did Shakespeare. Thus,
most of Bach's organ work was written while he was principally
an organist. At his death in 1750, the scores he wrote were divided
among his surviving children and his widow, and it was then that
the process of sale, dispersal, and loss began. The losses were enormous-over 100 church cantatas and more than half of his secular
cantatas disappeared without a trace. Even so, what remains is astonishing. There are over 200 church cantatas, 34 secular cantatas,
5 masses, plus 2 settings for the Magniﬁcat; 6 passions, 8 motets,
253 chorales and sacred songs; 260 organ works; about 200 works
for other keyboard instruments; 7 works for lute; about 40 chamber works and 25 for orchestra; and a dozen studies in canonic
music and counterpoint. There are probably about 1200 works
total out of perhaps 1600 or 1700 composed. Considering the
amount of time Bach had to spend playing, conducting, arguing
with oﬃcials, teaching, and copying, this output is astonishing. It
was an unceasing fountain of creativity.
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851): According
to Johnson, Turner was a creative genius on the scale of Bach,
in the sense that his painting was entirely original, unmistakably his own. It is impossible to confuse him with anyone else,
and he painted on a prodigious scale. He was from ﬁrst to last
a painter of landscapes and buildings (exteriors and interiors),
of seas and skies, mountains and lakes, rivers and forests, and
nothing more. He never did portraits, still lifes, animals, or
human ﬁgures (except for staﬀage). Within his chosen ﬁeld,
however, he was a master who has never been approached, let
alone equaled. He never did anything in his life except draw and
paint. He worked all day, every day. His family life was nothing,
though he had two mistresses and fathered two daughters. Work
occupied his entire life until a short time before his death at age
76. Unlike the works of Dürer and Bach, virtually all he did
has come down, for he marketed it with great skill and energy
or preserved it for the nation. Its extent is staggering: nearly
1000 oil paintings, some very large and elaborate, and about
20,000 drawings and watercolors. In addition, he left many
sketchbooks, some still intact. He etched and engraved and supplied materials for publication in the commercial book market,
imposing hard bargains on the men of business with whom he
dealt. These activities were ancillary to his major trade: to sell
large oil paintings to rich collectors at the highest possible prices.
For this purpose he exhibited every year at the Royal Academy
and also designed, built, and ran his own studio gallery.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849): Hokusai created Japanese landscape painting from nothing and also portrayed Japanese
life with dazzling graphic skill and an encyclopedic completeness
that has never been equaled, throwing in Japan's ﬂora and fauna
for good measure. Hokusai did nothing else in life but paint.
Like Dürer, Hokusai began with wood blocks but, unlike Dürer,
he did not come from the wealthy bourgeois. He had no useful
connections, no well-endowed wife; he worked fanatically hard
all his life and made only a bare living. Whatever he did manage
to save went to pay the gambling debts of a son and grandson.
Jane Austen (1775-1817): Her time as a female creator
was always a source of embarrassment to her kin, even if they

Facts and ideas from anywhere

487

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings October 2017