Alexandria of Bavaria Died - Sept. 21, 1875

Alexandria of Bavaria died on this day in 1875. There's more in the April 24, 2015 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class, "The Princess Who Swallowed a Glass Piano."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and at September
twenty one. Princess Alexandra Amalia of Bavaria died on this

(00:26):
day in eighteen seventy five. She was part of the
House of Vittlesbok, which ruled Bavaria for more than seven
hundred years until the early twentieth century. She was born
on August eighteen twenty six. Her father was Ludwig the
First of Bavaria, but he left the throne very abruptly

(00:46):
after a public extramarital affair. Alexandra's brother then assumed the
throne in eighteen forty eight and ruled as Maximilian the
Second until eighteen sixty four. Alexandra was twenty two when
this happened, and she had had a very lonely upbringing.
It was not a particularly happy childhood or adolescence. She

(01:07):
was also the only one of her siblings not to marry,
and she had some signs of mental illness, including a
very intense preoccupation with cleanliness, and her behavior was a
little eccentric. She, for example, would only wear white. About
a year after her father's abdication. When Alexander was twenty three,
her parents saw her walking sideways and clearly struggling in

(01:30):
the palace. Her parents asked her what was wrong, and
she said that when she was a child, she had
swallowed a grand piano made of glass. She was afraid
that if she bumped into anything, she would shatter. There
were two things that seemed particularly odd about this delusion.
One was that she believed she had swallowed something that

(01:53):
was much bigger than she was, and the other was
that she came to believe, as an adult that she
had done this when she was a child, and that
this piano was still inside of her. This caused her
physical distress. It made her very careful of how she
moved around. Another year or so later, in eighteen fifty,
she was treated in a mental institution. It seems like

(02:15):
she did recover there, at least somewhat. In eighteen fifty two,
she started to publish books of stories and essays and
poems and other work, and she also worked in a
children's theater. Eventually, she went to a convent in Munich,
and she spent a lot of her later life there,
including becoming an abbess. She died at the family's summer

(02:36):
palace at the age of forty nine on September twenty one,
eighteen seventy five. But this isn't just a sad story
of a lonely young woman and a psychiatric disorder. From
the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, doctors reported a
number of patients who believed that part of their body
was made of glass. This became known as the glass dellusion. Basically,

(02:59):
people thought that they were turning into glass, or that
they were made of glass, or that they had become
some kind of a glass object, like a flask or lamp.
People who had this delusion would take a lot of
care not to be bumped or jostled or to come
into contact anything hard because of the fear that they

(03:19):
would shatter. So people who had this delusion might, for example,
always sit on cushions because they were afraid if they
sat on a hard chair that they would physically break.
A lot of writers have talked about the fear of
harm coming to your body and that manifesting as this
glass delusion. But we wouldn't diagnose somebody with a glass

(03:42):
delusion today. The delusion itself would be a symptom of
some particular psychiatric disorder, rather than describing the disorder itself.
You can learn more about Princess Alexandra and the glass
delusion on the apisode of Stuff You Missed in History
Class that one's called the Princess who Swallowed a glass piano.

(04:03):
Thanks to Tari Harrison for her audio work on this podcast,
and you can subscribe to This Day in History Class
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Tune in tomorrow for an assassination in the Zulu Kingdom