Reading biographies of the jazz greats, Dr. Frederick J. Spencer often found something lacking.
“The careers of many jazz musicians may have been accurately documented," Spencer writes in the introduction to his new book Jazz and Death: Medical Profiles of Jazz Greats (University Press of Mississippi), “but accounts of their illnesses and deaths often vary and lack conviction."
In The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jazz, Scott Joplin is reported to have “suffered a total nervous collapse in 1911 and was ultimately consigned to an insane asylum in 1916. A year later, he was dead."
Not so, says Spencer. “Joplin
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