Posted on 08/28/2007 4:27:40 PM PDT by RDTF
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Did someone kill Beethoven? A Viennese pathologist claims the composer's physician did -- inadvertently overdosing him with lead in a case of a cure that went wrong.
Other researchers are not convinced, but there is no controversy about one fact: The master had been a very sick man years before his death in 1827.
Previous research determined that Beethoven had suffered from lead poisoning, first detecting toxic levels of the metal in his hair and then, two years ago, in bone fragments. Those findings strengthened the belief that lead poisoning may have contributed -- and ultimately led -- to his death at age 57.
But Viennese forensic expert Christian Reiter claims to know more after months of painstaking work applying CSI-like methods to strands of Beethoven's hair.
He 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.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Lord have mercy. Thanks.
His liver may have been leaden, but his music was purest gold.
GGG Ping
“Ludwig, how many times have I told you - don’t chew on the Chinese toys!”
An early case of HillaryCare?
God, please let me die without the aid of a physician.
He had a tough life. There is some evidence to suggest that his ears were damaged when he was a child by the severe beatings administered by his father, who was obsessed with making Beethoven the next Mozart.
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