Orange County Register

As one wag put it, the headline should read: “Beethoven — Still dead!”

It’s been known for years that Beethoven suffered from lead poisoning. Tests on his bones and locks of his hair have shown it. It’s also been surmised that lead poisoning may have made him deaf. But a Viennese pathologist has come up with some new, more specific information:

[Christian Reiter] says his analysis, published last week in the Beethoven Journal, shows that in the final months of the composer’s life, lead concentrations in his body spiked every time he was treated by his doctor, Andreas Wawruch, for fluid inside the abdomen. Those lethal doses permeated Beethoven’s ailing liver, ultimately killing him, Reiter told The Associated Press.

“His death was due to the treatments by Dr. Wawruch,” said Reiter, head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Vienna’s Medical University. “Although you cannot blame Dr. Wawruch – how was he to know that Beethoven already had a serious liver ailment?”

Nobody did back then.

Only through an autopsy after the composer’s death in the Austrian capital on March 26, 1827, were doctors able to establish that Beethoven suffered from cirrhosis of the liver as well as edemas of the abdomen. Reiter says that in attempts to ease the composer’s suffering, Wawruch repeatedly punctured the abdominal cavity – and then sealed the wound with a lead-laced poultice.

…

Analysis of several hair strands showed “several peaks where the concentration of lead rose pretty massively” on the four occasions between Dec. 5, 1826, and Feb. 27, 1827, when Beethoven himself documented that he had been treated by Wawruch for the edema, said Reiter. “Every time when his abdomen was punctured … we have an increase of the concentration of lead in the hair.”

Read more here.

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