Fascinating forensic read by Ari Daniel at NPR.
Beethoven is well-known to have gone deaf as he aged, but that, and other ailments, were all likely due to lead poisoning.
When someone is exposed to lead, some of the harmful metal gets deposited in their hair. This means that even without a blood sample, scientists can use someone’s hair to determine their lead levels posthumously.
So the owner of two separate locks of Beethoven’s hair put something like two or three dozen strands in a special collection kit and shipped it to the Mayo Clinic — where Sarah Erdahl, Technical Coordinator at the Metals Lab, received it.
The result?
The lead levels, on the other hand, were a startling 64 to 95 times higher than the hair of someone today.
[Paul] Jannetto [director of the Metals Laboratory at the Mayo Clinic] says that even for people of his time period, the lead levels in Beethoven’s hair would have been about 10 times higher than average. “What this showed is he had a chronic exposure to high concentrations of lead,” he says.
The lead wouldn’t have killed him, but it likely contributed to his health problems.
“A lot of those documented ailments that Beethoven had,” says Jannetto, “those are traditional signs and symptoms that a neurologist or clinician could see in a patient that was exposed to lead.” These include liver disease (which would have been aggravated by his genetic risk factor, regular drinking, and infection with hepatitis B), gastrointestinal challenges, and hearing loss.
Amazing. Generations of people thought they knew for a fact that Beethoven slowly went deaf as he aged. It turns out he is a poster boy for lead poisoning. You have to wonder: had they connected the dots in his age, would lead poisoning have been named for him in a similar fashion to ALS being known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease?