The Princess who Swallowed a Glass Piano

Princess Alexandra Amelie of Bavaria was part of the House of Wittelsbach. The princess was frail, and she exhibited unusual behavior. She told her parents that she had swallowed a glass piano as a child, and was afraid that she would shatter.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying, and
today we're going to talk about a very curious case

(00:23):
of a delusion that doesn't really exist anymore. Princess Alexandra
Amalia of Bavaria was part of the House of Vittlespach,
which ruled Bavaria for more than seven hundred years until
the early twentieth century. She was born on August six
and was one of nine children. Most of these were

(00:43):
pretty notable royal people, and she has plenty of relatives
who were a lot more famous or maybe infamous than
she was. One of them that jumps out is her nephew,
Lukevig the Second, who was also called Mad King Lukewig.
He was known for deeply eccentric behavior and for a
fairy tale castle that he built, and for his suspicious death.

(01:05):
So Katie and Sarah did a podcast on all of
that back in two and they brought up Alexandra's own
dubious claim to fame in that episode, which is her
belief that she had swallowed a glass piano, which is
quite something to believe it is, and a little context
might help us all wrapper heads around this very particular delusion.

(01:26):
So for familiar background, the princess's father was Ludvig One
of Bavaria, and he was known for being a bad poet,
uh really great patron of the arts, and a notorious womanizer,
so he sounds like a lot of fun. He had
many affairs, unfortunately, and decorated a room in the palace

(01:46):
with portraits of beautiful women. And he also had a
large birthmark on his forehead, and that's actually left out
of most depictions of him. Her mother was Torees of
Saxa Hildeberghausen, and she married Ludvic on Octo for twelfth,
eighteen ten, and their wedding festivals sparked the tradition that
has led to today's October fest. Terres had a hand

(02:08):
in ruling the kingdom, and the people were extremely fond
of her, especially as she put up with all of
Ludwig's affairs. She got a lot of sympathy from people.
Alexandra's father left the throne pretty abruptly. He had started
a really public affair with Lola Montez and she was
an Irish woman who was pretending to be a Spanish aristocrat.

(02:28):
The people of Munich hated her. She was coarse, and
she swore, and she was disrespectful to the Queen, who,
as we just said, they really loved, and she seemed
to have a really big influence on the king's opinions. Meanwhile,
the king had given her a title, money and a home,
so she was super unpopular and in the wake of

(02:50):
the affair, Lidzig abdicated the throne and Alexander's brother succeeded him.
Her brother ruled as Maximilian the Second from eighteen forty
eight to eighteen sixty four. Off then, this is portrayed
as the king left the throne because of the affair,
and that was really just one piece of the puzzle.
There were other things going on. There were other revolts

(03:10):
going on against the monarchy and other parts of Europe
at the time. Um Plus Luvic had a pretty liberal
reputation when he ascended to the throne, and people were
disappointed that the decisions that he made as king didn't
really match up with what they had expected of him
when he rose to power. They also didn't really like
the decisions that he was making, which they attributed to

(03:31):
Lola's influence. So it wasn't just that he had had
this scandalous affair going on. There were other things that
led him to abdicate. That was just one of the
big items that people can easily point to. Right And
speaking of Lola, a mob burned down her house after
the abdication and she ended up fleeing and running to London.

(03:52):
So all of this happened when Alexander was about twenty two.
She was the only one of her siblings apart from
one who died in infancy, who never got married, and
only one of her siblings hadn't yet gotten married when
all of this happened, So Alexander was still living at
home and she was pretty set apart from the rest
of her family at this point, and it was a

(04:13):
very public royal family. People you know, knew all of them.
Her siblings were married to royalty in many of their houses,
and the family was really hit hard by this scandal
and abdication, and Alexander's health and mental illness were already
a little bit frail. She wasn't really hearty, and she
was super preoccupied with cleanliness, and she would wear only white,

(04:37):
so she already had some behaviors that were a little
bit obsessive and suggested that she was not quite perfectly balanced. Right, So,
just because one thing happened after another thing, it doesn't
mean the first thing caused the second thing. But this
must have been a really difficult time for somebody who
was already pretty isolated and not in good health. And

(04:59):
within a year of her father's abdication, when Alexandra was
twenty three, her parents saw her walking sideways, clearly struggling
in the palace, and when her parents asked her what
was wrong, she told them that when she was a child,
she had actually swallowed a grand piano made of glass,

(05:20):
and she was consequently frightened that if she bumped into anything,
she would shatter, that the piano that she believed she
was still carrying inside of her would break apart. So
there are two things that are particularly strange in this delusion,
and one is that she believed she had swallowed something
that was much much bigger than she was she believed
it to be an entire grand piano. And the other

(05:43):
is that she became to believe, as an adult that
she had already done this when she was a child
and that the piano was still inside of her. It
caused her physical distress and it made it it made
her really, really careful and how she moved around a
and roughly a year or so later, in eighteen fifty

(06:03):
she was actually treated for this delusion in a mental institution.
It seems like she made some recovery there. In eighteen
fifty two she started to publish books of stories, essays, poems,
and other work, and she also worked in children's theater.
Eventually she went to a convent in Munich and she
spent much of her later life there and even she

(06:25):
even became an abbess, which seems like she she must
have been doing better at this point. You wouldn't quite
get into a position of authority if you were having
that sort of problem. Yeah, she died at the family's
summer palace at the age of forty nine on September one,
eight seventy. But she is not the only person historically
who has had the glass delusion. No, that's an actual

(06:49):
delusion that that was cited pretty often between the Middle
Ages and all the way into the early nineteenth century.
It's maybe not something that was super common, but it
was revalent enough that it appears in both medical writing
and in literature from the time. Basically, people became convinced
that they were either turning into glass, or that they

(07:09):
were made out of glass, or that they had turned
into a glass object like a flask. This is usually
cited as a urinal, which was just the word that
was used for a little glass jar kind of thing
or a lamp. They would be really careful not to
get bumped or jostled or come into contact with anything
with anything hard, because people who had this delusion were

(07:31):
afraid that they would shatter, and it often came naturally
with an extreme preoccupation with protecting themselves and avoiding contact
with others. Some people were even afraid that loud noises
would break them, so at that point they would have
to be not touching anyone or he in a quiet place,
kind of an isolation that probably would propagate the delusion

(07:54):
even further. Yeah, but a lot of times people were
afraid that they're ducks or glass and that they would
shatter if they sat down on anything hard. Um. This
whole idea of being breakable and being afraid that you're
going to break was also not really new. As a delusion,
but before the Middle Ages people thought that they were
made of pottery rather than glass. But the core idea

(08:18):
was still there of if someone touches me too hard,
I will break. And at the time this delusion was
tied to melancholia, and it was generally among people who
were very isolated and withdrawn from the company of other people.
And a lot of times people who had this delusion
also had photophobia and they wanted to stay out of
the sun. The first medical report of the condition may

(08:40):
have been around fifteen sixty one, and it was in
a treatise by the Dutch physician Lemnius, who described a
man who would not sit down because he believed his
buttocks were glass. Charles the sixth of France also allegedly
had this condition and believed that his whole body was glass,
so he wouldn't let people touch him, and he had
special clothing that was reinforced with ribs made so that

(09:02):
he could wear that and then not break. And more
than one physician to royalty has described this condition. Alphonse
Paunce to Santa Cruz, who was the physician to fill
up the Second of Spain, described it around sixteen fourteen
and he described it as an unnamed person in this case,
possibly a prince that thought he was made of glass,

(09:24):
and his physician told him to lie in a straw
bed so that he wouldn't break, and then the bed
was conveniently set ablaze, forcing the prince to move quickly
without consequently breaking, and that relieved him of the delusion.
Kind of reminds me of cartoons, like hitting the person
on the head with amnesia again to make their yes.

(09:46):
Um Andrea do Lauren, who was the chief physician to
Henry the fourth, also described that case. In his writings.
Uh Louis de Casseneuve, who was the royal physician in France,
described a gassmaker who constantly wore a cushion because he believed,
again his buttocks were made of glass, and that doctor
allegedly cured him by spanking him so again just proving

(10:10):
that what the person believed was not the case. People
also described that they had glass hearts or glass heads
or glass chests that had to be protected. And there's
one theory that a lot most of the people who
described being afraid that they were glass were educated people,
and they may have heard of this syndrome in medical writings,

(10:33):
and that may have contributed to eventually developing the delusion,
obviously based on other tendencies to be afraid and and
having other mental things going on, right, so it may
have just shaped kind of the way that their delusion developed,
rather than being a spontaneous thought of their own uh.

(10:55):
And psychological writings at the time attributed many causes to
this delusion, including the preoccupation with chastity, purity, and fortune. UH.
And glass, we should note, was tied to fortune in
folklore and literature because of its fragility, so fortune may
turn on you as easily as as glass may break
was kind of the underlying theme there. There were also

(11:18):
physiological explanations at the time, including that the people's brains
were too dry, and that was tied to melancholia in general,
and the glass delusion, as you mentioned a little while ago,
also appears a lot in literature. UH. In the sixteen
o seven allegorical play Lingua, most likely by English playwright
Thomas tom Kiss, there is a character who believes he

(11:40):
has become a glass jurnal. There's also the six thirteen
short story The Glass Graduate by Servantes. His main character,
Thomas Rhodaga, is obsessed with the idea that he's made
of glass. He wouldn't wear restrictive clothing, he would drink
water from his hands instead of a cup, and sleep
in he loss, and he would walk in the middle

(12:02):
of the road because he was scared that if he
walked by the side that he could be shattered if
roof tiles fell on him. In this story, he winds
up with this delusion because of an aphrodisiac that has
gone horribly wrong. In sixty one, in The Anatomy of Melancholy,
Robert Burton writes about this delusion under symptoms or signs
in the mind, and he ties it to a fear

(12:24):
of devil's death and danger. The seventeenth century writer Apollo
de Medina was a Spanish writer who had a character
who was a dandy and believed his bottom was made
of glass, and he had to he had to commit
himself to an asylum after cracking it while answering the
call of nature. And this that's sort of my personal note. This,
this series of stories about people who believe their glass

(12:48):
and might break really reminds me of the possibly apocryphal
story about the person who does too much lsd and
then starts to think that he's a glass of orange juice.
If anybody touches him, he's going to spill. Both of
these have the same underlying sense of um fear and
the dangers of taboo behaviors. I had not heard that

(13:08):
one until it came up in in this podcast research.
I heard it in high school. I never heard that,
and it's on It's on Snoops, so other people I
believe it. I just fished that one for other people
than me have heard it. They just have very they
have similarities, and there are commonalities for sure, and how
they express a sense of this odd fear and uh,

(13:31):
as you said, like the taboo of not behaving properly.
And there is a lot of modern research on these
delusions as well well. There there have been modern writers
who have kind of gone through and documented all of
the various citations of the glass delusion in medical literature
and in literature. There are other things that that have
been documented that we didn't go over here because then

(13:54):
it would just be a list of names and dates
and that would be annoying. But the BBC did an
audio program called The Glass Piano in and in it
an actor plays Princess Alexandra, and then they interview modern
scholars to offer some commentary about this delusion that she
experienced and sort of how she might have come to
this state. Uh psychoanalyst Susie or Box says that it

(14:18):
was important that Alexander's piano was specifically a piano and
not another glass thing. Piano, of course, means soft, and
what she thought she swallowed was huge and fragile, but
if she had been able to, she could have used
it to make music. Historian Aaron Sullivan talks in the
program about doing work into the history of emotions, and

(14:39):
she specifically talks about the history of sadness, and Sullivan
talks about the connection between melancholy and the glass delusion.
A lot of times, the underlying fear was the fear
of being vulnerable, So men would be afraid that their
body was becoming glass, and they would remove themselves from
society to protect themselves that they wouldn't have to have

(15:00):
that vulnerability in front of other people. In Sullivan's opinion,
Alexander's delusion may have been an expression of her underlying fragility,
and she does in portraits seem quite fragile. She casts
and there is an air about her where she looks delicate,
it's very she's very pensive. Her portrait was painted for
her father's gallery of beauties, and in it she's really pale.

(15:23):
She's dressed all in white. As we said earlier, she
went through a period where she would only wear white,
and she just has a very fragile and pensive air
about her. So you and I were talking earlier about
how it's it's not really a far walk to go
from being really uh, uncomfortable around people and withdrawing from

(15:43):
people and feeling isolated and being afraid of being hurt
to starting to believe that you're made of something that
will break if you're hurt. Yeah, I mean you can
see how someone who is isolated, there's nothing to stop
that delusion from developing. Right, Everything they're doing on their
own is sort of supporting it. Unlike the instances we
cited where physicians kind of did like an extreme immersive

(16:07):
shock therapy of like, no, you're not going to break,
you're just fine, uh, you know. Not everyone had that,
and so the delusion just kind of grows and takes
on a life of its own, becomes very consuming. So
that is the story of the Princess who swallowed the
glass piano. I really empathize with her. Yeah, do you
think you swallowed something? I do not think I care.

(16:29):
I don't think I've swallowed something glass. But I can
you know, I'm kind of a neurotic, anxious person. I can.
I can start of see if I were living in
a in a palace when my brothers and sisters had
all gotten married and gone off to live their own
lives and other palaces elsewhere, and I didn't really have
anybody to talk to you, and I was already kind
of of a neurotic mindset, I can sort of see

(16:51):
getting to that point in the isolated halls of the
castle where my father had been forced from the throne
to be replaced by my brother. Yeah, it is, as
you said, a short walk. I mean, it's easy to
see how that happens. And now I believe you have
a bit of listener mails from you. I have two
listener mails and they are both about our episode on
Australia's rabbit Proof Fence. The first is from Karen, and

(17:13):
Karen says this morning while listening to the podcast Australia's
rabbit Proof Fence on stuff you missed in history class.
Holly mentioned that the first people to come to Australia
happened about three thousand to four thousand years ago. I'd
like to correct them by saying people populated Australia around
forty thousand years ago. We have cave Art and Kockadoo
that's been dated back forty thousand years. Keep up the

(17:34):
good work, and then on our Facebook we have Alex.
Alex says hi, thanks for a great couple of episodes
on Australian history. Just a correction splash misunderstanding that now
appears to have turned into a lengthy episode suggestion. I
haven't gone through other people's comments on this episode, so
this may have already been said. When talking about the
dingo as a native animal, you said that dingo has

(17:56):
arrived with the Aborigines around three thousand to four thousand
year years ago. While the dingo may have arrived around
that time or as long as ten thousand years ago,
the Aborigines probably reached Australia as long ago as sixty
thousand years I think this would make a great episode
topic as it covers an almost unknown period in human history.
A group of prehistoric people must have built boats and

(18:19):
embarked on an epic voyage tens of thousands of years
before other people could have achieved anything like this. Another
interesting aspect is that Aboriginal culture has existed continually through
this time, making it the oldest existing culture on Earth.
It is also something that has often been left out
of history class on purpose. Even a relatively modern history

(18:40):
books begin with the history of Australia starting with the
arrival of Captain Cook, despite the fact that modern Australia
has existed for something like one percent of the time
it has been inhabited by humans. N sixties book, I
have to hand described the Aborigines as quote, I'm just
gonna apologize at advance for how a and said this
nineteen sixties textook is that was my side, the most

(19:04):
backward race on Earth, who gave us some jolly place
names before going on at grade length about the mining
and stock raising industries. So thank you. Also, Alex, this
ye're good, doesn't just make your still make her a
little bit, made my stomach hard a lot. And this
so number one, I would like to apologize because this
is an example of what I wrote in my notes

(19:24):
was not clear. And then constantly. I misspoken had portraits
of work, and we said it wrong. We do know
amboriguities longer than that, yes, but just the yeah, the
dingo arrival thing got kind of conflated in with other things, right,
So my apologies because that was not wise on my part.
Mutual apologies, so and and my notes admittedly were not
clear on this point. Um. What we were trying to

(19:46):
say was that the Dingoes arrived with some humans who
also arrived that long ago. We did not mean to
imply that those were the first humans ever in Australia.
We may have actually said that, but that that was
because my notes. We're messed up on the point Lawonga, Yes,
because sometimes we make errors with the best of intentions.

(20:07):
So um. Alex's comment actually led to some pretty lively
conversation on our Facebook page about how the the Aboriginal
people's who populated Australia arrived there and whether it was
via a land bridge or via boats. Um was a
pretty interesting discussion, and I agree that would be a
great podcast episode. So hopefully we will get that in

(20:31):
the queue sooner rather than later. We have so many
good ideas from listeners. I know it's hard to. We
can't guarantee that will hit them all. Just the volume
to our production ratio is not possible. Please send us
ideas because we love to hear ideas. But when I
made a list of all the ideas that we had
gotten in March, and there were about a hundred and
fifty of them, and we do two episodes a week,

(20:53):
So as much as we love to hear suggestions, there
are just so many of them that we cannot possibly
do them all. But we will do our best. We will.
If you would like to send us a suggestion or
write to us about this podcast or anything else, you
can at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also
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(21:17):
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and we are on Pinterest. If you would like to
learn about something that I think maybe a modern equivalent
of the glass delusion, you can go to our website.
Search the word hypochondria and you will find the article
what is cyberchondria. You can learn that in a whole
lot more at our website, which is how Stuff works

(21:38):
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