Call me old fashioned, but amid the daily grind of the pharmacy prescribing trial and Senator Hollie Hughes’ “completely self-serving” comments about GPs, one sometimes wishes for a more highbrow medical discourse: something academic, inconsequential but nonetheless intriguing.

For example, did German composer Ludwig van Beethoven have ulcerative colitis?

While famously deaf in his later years, Beethoven also had a plethora of other symptoms — including diarrhoea and cirrhosis — prompting almost 200 years of scientific debate about what killed him.

In an article in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology, SA pathologist Associate Professor Phil Allen provides a long list of diagnoses that have been suggested posthumously: lead poisoning, syphilis, viral hepatitis, Whipple’s disease, TB, lupus, Paget’s disease and more.