Poisoned?
Hair analysis suggests that high levels of lead from a medical procedure killed Beethoven.
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In the days following the death of Ludwig van Beethoven, friends and admirers came to see her body and cut her hair for the memories. Recent chemical analysis of one of these stolen locks has now led scientists to conclude that medical treatment may have accelerated Beethoven's death by his deteriorating lead poisoning.
Four months before his death in March 1827, Beethoven began to suffer from excessive abdominal swelling, perhaps due to cirrhosis. To drain fluid, his doctor, Andreas Wawruch, pierced her abdomen with a needle. Researchers have known since 05 that Beethoven had suffered from a severe lead poisoning. The most recent study of his hair, led by forensic pathologist Christian Reiter of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, links the two problems.
As the hair grows, it absorbs substances, including lead, from the bloodstream. For his research, Reiter analyzed two hairs with a spectrograph and created a daily log of the internal chemistry of Beethoven in his last 4 months. The composer received abdominal punctures four times on his deathbed, draining between 7.7 and 14 liters of fluid from his body each time. The amount of lead in the hair spiked after each composer abdominal puncture. The correlation suggests that palliative measure worsened the lead poisoning, and Reiter accuses lead salts used to clean the wound as a likely culprit. Reiter speculates that lead has worsened cirrhosis of the composer and hastened his death. The English translation of his study appears in the latest issue of The Beethoven Journal .
"The fact doctor may have killed [Beethoven] with lead poisoning," says William Walsh, director of research at the Health Research Institute and Pfeiffer Treatment Center in Warrenville, Illinois . Walsh, who orchestrated an earlier chemical analysis of hair from Beethoven, spent 30 years conducting a forensic analysis of hair.
Reiter reported lower levels of lead to the end of Beethoven's life that made the Walsh studies. as a result, Walsh said, the two scientists will work together to reach consensus on possible levels of lead. "There are limits to what you can do with hair," he said . "There is a lot of data showing that chemical analysis is completely reliable when you get a few inches of the scalp."
Related Sites
- The Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven studies
- The film "Hair Beethoven"
- health research Institute and Pfeiffer Treatment Center
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