Down on the brick floor of the University of Maryland’s Davidge Hall, a noted professor of medicine is about to perform a most unusual postmortem.Although this domed amphitheater with its steeply rising seats has hosted medical lectures and demonstrations for more than 200 years, today’s offering is exceptional, for the deceased’s remains are nowhere in sight. And at the conclusion of the autopsy, a string quarter will present a program of 18th-century music. The occasion is the university’s sixth annual historical clinical pathology conference. Each year the university’s medical school invites a physician to diagnose the mysterious maladies of historical figures ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Alexander the Great. This year’s patient is a 35-year-old male who died in Vienna after a two-week illness. His body was consigned to a common grave, but his genius still resounds in concert halls the world over. Controversy has surrounded this particular case history, Fitzgerald explains, because of the deceased’s celebrity status: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s death “wouldn’t have been mysterious at all if Wolfgang Amadeus Muller had died that December night.”Strastruck physicians have since ascribed Mozart’s death to more than 100 causes. “Each of these [diagnoses] is argued with a passion disproportionate to the data,” Fitzgerald points out. “And of course, Mozart died of syphilis as well as everything else, because every great man dies of syphilis.”According to musicologist Neal Zaslaw of Cornell University, who sketches a brief Mozart biography, the death and burial entries in two church registers list the cause of death as “severe miliary fever,” a generic descriptor at the time for any syndrome marked by a seedlike rash. Press reports of his passing supplied such colorful and sinister diagnosis as poisoning, venereal disease, and dropsy of the heart, the 18th-century term for fluid retention and severe swelling. Thus, overweight imaginations and the sands of time have turned tragedy into a medical mystery aching to be solved. That’s just the sort of material that appeals to the school’s vice chair of medicine, Philip Mackowiak, who launched the conference six years ago after reading an account in a Maryland historical magazine of Edgar Allan Poe’s final days. He hired an actor to play Poe and asked his colleague Michael Benitez to review the writer’s medical history. The diagnosis — death by rabies — was topped off, appropriately enough, with a monologue from Poe’s story The Black Cat.The rabies theory attracted enough attention to become a question on the TV game show Jeopardy. It’s instructive, too, to watch another physician work through a case without the benefit of modern technology, says Sehdev. In Mozart’s example, the most compelling symptom — anasarca— has three common causes: liver disease, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure. Lacking modern lab techniques, Fitzgerald must use deductive reasoning. 1.What is special about the sixth annual historical clinical pathology conference is that ___________.