Last edited Tue May 7, 2024, 04:52 AM - Edit history (1)
.. The result, said Paul Jannetto, the lab director, was stunning. One of Beethoven’s locks had 258 micrograms of lead per gram of hair and the other had 380 micrograms. A normal level in hair is less than 4 micrograms of lead per gram. “It definitely shows Beethoven was exposed to high concentrations of lead,” he said. These are the highest values in hair I’ve ever seen,” he added.. Beethoven’s hair also had arsenic levels 13 times what is normal and mercury levels that were 4 times the normal amount. But the high amounts of lead, in particular, could have caused many of his ailment.
The investigators describe their findings in a letter published on Monday in the journal Clinical Chemistry. The analysis updates a report from last year, when the same team said Beethoven did not have lead poisoning.
Now with thorough testing they say that he had enough lead in his system to, at the very least, explain his deafness and illnesses. David Eaton, at the Univ. of Wash. who was not involved in the study, said that Beethoven’s gastrointestinal problems “are completely consistent with lead poisoning.” As for Beethoven’s deafness, he added, high doses of lead affect the nervous system, and could have destroyed his hearing. Whether the chronic dose was sufficient to kill him is hard to say,” Dr. Eaton added. No one is suggesting the composer was deliberately poisoned. But, Jerome Nriagu, an expert on lead poisoning said that lead had been used in wines and food in 19th-c. Europe, as well as in medicines and ointments.
One likely source of Beethoven’s high levels of lead was cheap wine. Lead, in the form of lead acetate, also called “lead sugar” often added to poor quality wine to make it taste better.
Beethoven drank copious amounts of wine believing it was good for his health, and also because he had become addicted to it. A few days before his death at age 56 in 1827, his friends gave him wine by the spoonful. Anton Schindler, described the deathbed scene: “This death struggle was terrible to behold, for his general constitution, especially his chest, was gigantic. He still drank some of your Rüdesheimer wine in spoonfuls until he passed away.” On his deathbed, his publisher gave him a gift of 12 bottles of wine. Beethoven knew he could never drink them. He whispered his last recorded words: “Pity, pity — too late!”
When he was 32, Beethoven mourned that he could not hear a flute, or a shepherd singing, which, he wrote, “brought me almost to despair. A little more and I would have committed suicide — only Art held me back. Ah it seemed unthinkable to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I feel lies within me.” Over the years, Beethoven consulted many doctors, trying treatment after treatment for his ailments and his deafness, but found no relief. At one point, he was using ointments and taking 75 medicines, many of which most likely contained lead. In 1823, he wrote to an acquaintance, also deaf, about his own inability to hear, calling it a “grievous misfortune,” and noting: “doctors know little; one finally tires of them.”...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/health/beethoven-deaf-lead-hair.html
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