With all I've got going on, preparing for the FOHBC Houston24 national bottle expo, August 1-4, I've had little time to do research in preparation for a blog post. In the mean time, The History Blog, one of my favorite sites for (https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/70200) history, has posted a fascinating entry about the famous composer, Ludwig von Beethoven, that is exactly the kind of fascinating, story-behind-the-story medical history tidbit that I love. So with a tip of my hat to The History Blog, I am capturing their blogpost in full here. The image is also theirs, and I have linked it to their blog site, for your ease of finding your way to this interesting blog. I hope you enjoy, and a big thank you to the people behind The History Blog, none of whom I suspect I've ever met. The only things I've personally added to this blog post is the attached painting of Beethoven (from Wikimedia Commons) and the title of this blog entry, above. Here is the blog entry from The
History Blog, in its entirety, under the original title, "Beethoven was full of lead, arsenic and mercury," dated 15 May 2024:
"Analysis of authenticated locks clipped from Ludwig von Beethoven’s prodigious head of hair as he lay dying has found astronomically high levels of lead, arsenic and mercury. The poisoning was so severe, it may explain the symptoms that plagued him at the end of his life.
Researchers at the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University sampled five locks of hair previously confirmed as Beethoven’s by DNA analysis and subjected them to poison testing. The owner of three of the locks, Australian businessman and Beethoven afficionado Kevin Brown, sent two locks, one collected between 1820 and 1827, the other in April 1826, to a Mayo Clinic lab where they were tested for the presence of heavy metals.
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,” Jannetto said.
“These are the highest values in hair I’ve ever seen,” he added. “We get samples from around the world, and these values are an order of magnitude higher.”
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 ailments, Jannetto said.
The composer was famously suffering from hearing loss — he had been functionally deaf since he was 30, 26 years before he died — and he was also afflicted with chronic gastrointestinal problems (painful abdominal cramps, flatulence, diarrhea). High levels of lead damage the human nervous system, which could have caused his deafness, also cause liver and kidney damage. It may also have played a role in some of his other issues, like his notoriously terrible temper, memory lapses, and chronic clumsiness.
This is not an Agatha Christie case. The lead levels were not high enough to be fatal, and there is no reason to believe he was deliberately poisoned, but rather was exposed to the poisons in his daily environment. Lead, arsenic and mercury were in a lot of things people lived with, ate and drank, from food to medicine to wallpaper. He spent decades taking dozens of different types of nostrums in the attempt to cure his deafness and chronic illnesses, and they certainly contained lead, among many other poisons.
One likely source of Beethoven’s high levels of lead was cheap wine. Lead, in the form of lead acetate, also called “lead sugar,” has a sweet taste. In Beethoven’s time it was often added to poor quality wine to make it taste better.
Wine was also fermented in kettles soldered with lead, which would leach out as the wine aged, Nriagu said. And, he added, corks on wine bottles were presoaked in lead salt to improve the seal.
Beethoven drank copious amounts of wine, about a bottle a day, and later in his life even more, believing it was good for his health and also, Meredith said, because he had become addicted to it. In the last few days before his death at age 56 in 1827, his friends gave him wine by the spoonful.
This research fulfills a wish Beethoven expressed in 1802 to his brothers. He asked that after his death, they get his doctor to tell the world about his struggle with progressive hearing loss in the hope that “as far as possible at least the world will be reconciled to me after my death.”
I hope you enjoyed this. I'll try to get back to my next original, researched blog next week. Thanks again to https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/70200 .
Long, long ago, when I was just a little tyke, my mom put a big weight on my shoulders: she told me I had a good angel sitting on my right shoulder and a bad angel on my left shoulder. It was important that I listen to the good angel and not the bad angel, she counseled. I struggled with tinnitus in both ears even in those early years and I think that’s why I had a hard time knowing which voice I was listening to; at least that’s my excuse for my youth. And at 69, my tinnitus is worse than ever, so forgive me for everything.
Figuring out how to deal with Heaven and stay out of Hell has been a struggle throughout human history, mainly because it’s just so darned hard to walk the straight and narrow path that it would seem leads back to Heaven.
The earliest European colonists in North America were certain that they were actors on a great stage controlled by its writer, director, and producer: God. And as certain as they were that their lives were blessed and buffeted by Him, they also knew that Satan was real, with an army of demons that he unleashed to destroy the weakest among mankind. If the wary Christian didn't faithfully and rigidly follow God's commandments, they would be attacked, consumed, and controlled by the Devil and his minions, doomed to eternal pain and torment in the underworld of fire and brimstone, as an angry and vengeful God looked the other way.
The Bible, the great word of God, told them it was so. It contained spine-tingling stories of devils that had taken possession of the bodies of people and beasts. "Be sober, be vigilant" the Bible read, "because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour." The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 8, told of seven evil spirits who had been in the body of Mary Magdalene. Mark, Chapter 9, recited how the disciples had been unable to heal a boy who was possessed by a spirit that made him deaf and mute. It often hurled the boy “into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him.” Whenever it seized him, “he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth away." And in the fifth chapter of Mark there was the man who lived in a tomb, the very symbol of death, whom no chains could subdue; when Jesus asked the impure spirit his name, the chilling reply was "My name is Legion: for we are many."
As colonists read these accounts, their skin crawled with the thought that they might have their own demons inside themselves, proven by the wicked thoughts that inevitably seeped into their minds and the sins they secretly and frequently committed. The good part of them didn't want to, but the devil made them do it.
During 1692-93 over 200 people in Salem, Massachusetts, were accused of witchcraft and conspiring with their demonic animal familiars to do the bidding of the Devil. Eventually these dark, terrifying charges proved to be a combination of malicious falsehoods and tragic delusions by the accusers, clergy, lawmen, and judges who had prosecuted innocent people, executing twenty of them.
The Salem trials tragically occurred at the tail end of centuries of mankind viewing itself as merely dust being kicked up in the battle between an all-powerful, vengeful God and his nemesis, the Devil, the evil incarnate. As history moved forward through the end of the 17th and all of the 18th century, American life focused on material gain and to a lesser degree on attaining an eternal reward.
In the 19th century, newspaper accounts of Jack the Ripper and Lizzy Borden were eagerly followed by a public luridly curious about the evil extremes to which people would go, whether crazed or criminal masterminds, but the Devil got little credit for causing or directing their mayhem. The pursuit of reason, enlightenment, technology, and scientific advancement didn’t kill belief in the Devil, however; it only made him more bearable by defusing his power and danger. A refined empirical process of more scientific and rational investigation had made witchcraft accusations wither away; witches faded into folklore characters who scared little children at Halloween, and demons became the metaphors for the evils and illnesses that caused suffering and even death.
Devils became an advertising trope. Armies of horned, leathery-winged, pointy-tailed devils were now graphic Victorian metaphors emblazoned with the names of diseases and bodily evils on their wings and torsos, always defenseless, scared, and running or flying away from their all-powerful vanquisher – not God, but the advertised 19th century medicine.
Parker’s Ginger Tonic made such exorcisms look easy. The seated gentleman was very relaxed as he confidently held up a box of the product to put the threatened attack of child-sized demons into total disarray. Their childish, even cartoonish depiction suggested they were easy targets that never had a chance against such a grown-up, sophisticated medicine.
In another image for Parker’s, a larger army of devils attacked a small family, causing some fear among the mother and daughter, who clung to Father. Good choice: he stood heroically tall, holding up a bottle of Parker’s Ginger Tonic with stoic resolve. Like a masculine Statue of Liberty, the bottle scared away the demons of cramps, dyspepsia coughs, and diarrhoea (and unspecified ills surely carried by the other devils, subliminally implying that the tonic cured even more illness than its label and testimonials promised).
A box of Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills was even more aggressive, anthropomorphically sprouting legs and muscular arms and wearing boxing gloves, punching the lights out of malaria and the rest of the devilish lot who can be seen had a long history of accomplishing their hellish deeds. A long table behind the main event is littered with human bones and empty bottles of other products that had failed to stop their diseased evils. This battle royale is apparently occurring in Hades itself, which has bats (creatures from the underworld) and an owl (creature of the night) flying above, and fire (and perhaps a bit of brimstone below), the heat of which may have hinted at the cause of all the devils being shown in their traditional, red-skinned hues.
The confident hand of a professional in control of the situation (implied by the suit jacket and cufflinked shirt sleeve) emerges from the top right of the image pointing with his index finger (think Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel masterpiece), to the name on the bottle of Girondin Deodorizer & Disinfectant that he is pouring, to the great alarm and destruction of the many misshapen demons of “diphtheria, scarlet, typhoid fevers, and all other zymotic diseases ….” A winged angel and little cherubs hover on the heavenward side of the bottle, peacefully watching the destruction of hell below. Good and Evil are on opposite sides of the main character, each appropriately affected by the right choice being made with Girondin: early roots of my mother’s counsel, perhaps?
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a long-running advertising campaign for Raid insecticide showed all types of bugs being sent into a panic because they knew the product was their unavoidable destroyer in the same way that Parker’s Ginger Tonic, Mason & Pollard’s Anti-Malaria Pills, and Girondin Deodorizer & Disinfectant had stampeded the disease-carrying devils. Today, devils and demons are seldom mentioned in advertisements, no longer even deserving credit for causing sickness and pain; at best, they’ve been reduced from devils of disease to disgusting bugs. Polls about theology claim most Americans are moving on with their lives, increasingly dismissive of the Devil, like he doesn’t even exist. If they’re wrong, the future might start heating up.
Updated: Apr 27
I don't decide what to write about while sitting in front of my keyboard; I go look at my collection and it tells me what's next. This was especially true earlier today: it became instantly clear that only one very special bottle would work for the post of April 27th – my birthday.
The bottle is wonderful on several levels. I found it in the dirt without digging; it came out of a dirt pile in perfect, sparkling mint condition; and it's a classic 19th century patent medicine, made in a time when the courts and law enforcement had no muscle to subdue even the most outrageous claims of a medicine to cure. And Mother Nature handed me this jewel on my birthday at a private party that she held just for me.
It was easily one of the most vivid birthday moments of my life. Early in the morning of April 27th, 1986, I arrived at a large playground in Revere, Massachusetts, with my metal detector in hand, looking forward to finding some Indian Head pennies and Mercury dimes, and maybe even a few Barber dimes from the previous generation of coinage. My dear to wife had given me the gift of time on my birthday morning, letting me leave her at home alone with our four children, ages 8, 7, 6, and 3, while I went off to play in the dirt, listening for tell-tale pings in my earphones and digging for tiny treasures. Those precious few hours alone were sure to be pure bliss, but it was about to get even better.
That early morning was absolutely perfect - bright sunshine with blue skies and puffy white clouds. The air was cool and crisp in its newness, and quickly giving way to the warmth of the sun's rays that made the leaves on trees overhead glow with amber brilliance. I was anxious for my buddy to arrive with his metal detector so that we could begin together and enjoy the camaraderie and friendly competition of finding things in the ground on this glorious morning. After a short while, I felt impatient to perhaps begin even without my friend. I had promised my sweetheart that I would be home by noon for the birthday party she and the kids were planning for me (I knew she would be able to keep them away from the cake and ice cream for only so long) and I was anxious to seize the day and look for treasures in the ground.
Oddly, there were two massive mounds of dirt in the middle of the playground, obviously dumped there recently for spreading across the grounds at some later date. The piles were like two small mountains, towering even higher than the swings and slide nearby. While I waited for my friend, I walked around the dirt piles, noticing the sun shining on pieces of glass here and there. I knew from my experiences at bottle digging that where there's glass there are likely bottles. I carefully pulled and poked at larger pieces of exposed glass, hoping to find a bottle in them thar hills. Chunk after chunk proved to be evidence of old bottles, none close to complete. But then I saw something that gave me the feeling inside that this was the one; the bottle mouth and neck were poking out of the dirt, looking like a subterranean life form sticking its head out of the ground, curious about the world above. I grasped it firmly, hoped for the best, and pulled.
