Death of Ludwig Van Beethoven - Lead Poisoning Overdose

Lead Poisoning Overdose

There is dispute about the cause of Beethoven's death; alcoholic cirrhosis, syphilis, infectious hepatitis, lead poisoning, sarcoidosis and Whipple's disease have all been proposed. In 2008, Austrian pathologist Christian Reiter asserted that Beethoven's doctor, Andreas Wawruch, accidentally killed the composer by giving him an overdose of a lead-based cure. According to Reiter, Wawruch used the cure to alleviate fluid in the abdomen; the lead penetrated Beethoven's liver and killed him. Reiter's hypothesis however is at odds with Dr. Wawruch's written instruction "that the wound was kept dry all the time". Furthermore, human hair is a very bad biomarker for lead contamination, and Reiter's hypothesis must be considered dubious as long as proper scholarly documentation remains unpublished.

A lead-poisoning expert at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York tested the same piece of Beethoven's skull that had been examined in 2005, along with another, larger, fragment. The researcher, Dr. Andrew C. Todd, said that overall he had found no more lead than in the average person's skull. "Beethoven didn't have long-term high lead exposure," Dr. Todd said, "so I think we can stop looking at lead as being a major factor in his life." Dr. Todd's findings at Mount Sinai surprised Dr. William R. Meredith, a Beethoven scholar who had carried the skull fragments to New York from his base in California. He said he had expected Dr. Todd's tests to show elevated lead levels, because the previous tests had reported the amount in Beethoven's hair as well above normal. "It's back to the drawing board for the scientists and the doctors," Dr. Meredith said. He said the value of Dr. Todd's tests was that they told how much—or, as it turned out, how little—lead was in the skull fragments. Dr. Todd had promised precise measurements, and after two days of tests at Mount Sinai, he said that the larger of the two skull fragments had 13 micrograms of lead per gram, "not markedly above what we would expect" in a man of Beethoven's age, 56. The smaller fragment registered considerably more—48 micrograms per gram—and he could not explain the difference. Lead exposure is cumulative, Dr. Todd said, so the level can be expected to increase as a person ages, even if he or she is not exposed to abnormal concentrations from, say, lead paint. Dr. Meredith said that if the tests did not show what had killed Beethoven, at least they indicated what to rule out as a cause of death. "People ask whether he died from drinking plum wine, from chewing on his pencil, from eating fish that were poisoned," said Dr. Meredith, a professor at San Jose State University and the director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies. "Now we know all of those questions are unnecessary. We don't need to go fishing around for toxic exposure to lead." Dr. William J. Walsh, a forensic researcher in Illinois who coordinated the earlier tests, noted that Dr. Todd had tested only skull fragments, not the hair samples. But he agreed with the notion that Beethoven's exposure to lead was a short-term problem that had come toward the end of his life. Like Dr. Walsh's tests, some of which were conducted at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the Mount Sinai analysis involved multiple measurements with X-ray fluorescence. Dr. Todd said the matter in the skull was similar to the matter found in leg bones that he studies to determine whether someone has lead poisoning. The condition is known to cause irritability, low energy, headaches and to make muscles seem weak: all symptoms consistent with Beethoven's.