Hundred blind and sight impaired composers (nearsightedness excluded unless complicated), with two more extensive patographies (Bach J.S., Handel G. F.)

This paper presents an overview of composers with impaired sight (Bach J.S., Handel G. F.) in the last five hundred years, according to the data obtained from the biographies of more than ten thousand com posers and over a thousand patographies. This is, to our knowledge, the world’s largest processed sample so far. Diseases unveiled and comorbidities have had an impact on lives and (ability to) work of affected composers. Successful sight-impaired (96) composers are more often represented than the deaf (43) composers, indicating that blindness is a lesser handicap than deafness regarding the creativity of composers