Since then, Viennese forensic expert Christian Reiter has conducted 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, found 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 said.
"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 blame the doctor 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.
Although lead's toxicity was known even then, the doses contained in a treatment balm "were not poisonous enough to kill someone if he would have been healthy," Reiter said. "But what Dr. Wawruch clearly did not know [was] that his treatment was attacking an already sick liver."
Even before the edemas developed, Wawruch noted in his diary that months before Beethoven's death, he treated him for pneumonia with salts containing lead, which aggravated what researchers believe was an existing case of lead poisoning.
But, said Reiter, it was the doses of the lead-containing cream, administered by Wawruch in the last weeks of Beethoven's life, that did in the composer.
