After a rollercoaster ride through so much wonderful music, punctuated by personal tragedy and illness and then abbreviated by death, let us define what themes and conclusions may be drawn. Unease persists with some accounts of composers’ deaths. Although uncertainty will continue regarding the exact cause of Mozart's death, that he was not poisoned is beyond all reasonable doubt, and his final illness, from either kidney or heart failure, took two and a half weeks. There have been cases, more than a hundred years ago, where analysis of contemporaneous accounts allows confident clinical conclusions, as with Beethoven or Brahms. Clearly Schubert did not die of syphilis, although he almost certainly died with it.

A recurrent theme has been the dogmatic claims made by doctors and musicologists alike. Elgar's ‘last five words’ may reflect more about Ernest Newman than about Elgar. Before we leave Newman, surely his overwhelming character assassination of Beethoven is appalling, defacing the memory of a titanic figure. This tendency to advance the potentially salacious, especially VD or alcohol, can render an awful disservice to the reputations of great people who deserve better, something which had concerned Beethoven himself. Newman's judgement is continued in subsequent quotation by others – and to what end? Opinions from pompous medical pin-stripes should be discarded, along with an apparent urge to publish increasingly abstruse medical opinion. Merging of the scholarly with the ludicrous was seen with various published diagnoses in the cases of Mozart and Beethoven, for both of whom over a hundred diagnoses have previously been advanced. Hopefully, future research will be presented in a manner reasoned upon a balance of probabilities. Moreover, it is a mantra of good clinical practice to never make two or more diagnoses where one would do.

We should dispose of Mozart's Tourette's syndrome and Gershwin's ‘overwrought hysteria’. A recent Proms concert programme asserted that Schumann died of syphilis, with a suggestion that his hand problem had been self-inflicted; both are questionable. The biographer's responsibility is to do justice to all the evidence.