The irony of being Oscar: the legendary life and death of Oscar Wilde.

In this second in a series of famous historic personages who suffered from ear disease (see Yardley M, Rutka J. Troy, Mycenae, and the Otologic Demise of Herr Heinrich Schliemann. J Otolaryngol 1998; 27:217-221), we review the life and otology-related death of the legendary playwright Oscar Wilde. In his time, Wilde ridiculed the social hypocrisy of the Victorian age, championed the individual, and pleaded for a more tolerant and forgiving society in his many books, plays, and letters. Very much the acerbic and iconoclastic wit, Wilde's private and later very public affair de coeur with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquis of Queensberry, still continues to interest and paradoxically shock our sensitivities. Wilde's ultimate demise from an otogenic bacterial meningitis appears all the more ironic when one considers the role his father, Sir William Wilde, played as one of the founding fathers of modern otology.