Although Ludwig van Beethoven died almost 200 years ago, the reason for his death is not clear and today it remains an enigma that many scientists are interested in solving.
Researchers recently extracted DNA from strands of his hair looking for clues to the health issues and hearing loss that bothered him.
While they couldn’t solve the case of the German composer’s deafness or severe stomach ailments, they did find a genetic risk for liver disease. They also found that what damaged his liver in the last months of his life was a hepatitis B infection.
These factors, along with his chronic alcohol use, were likely enough to cause liver failure that is believed to have killed him, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology.
The composer himself wrote that he wanted doctors to study his health problems after his death. He passed away at the age of 56, on March 26, 1827. He will be 196 years old next Sunday.
How was the study of Beethoven’s hair
“In the case of Beethoven in particular, it so happened that illnesses sometimes limited his creative work a lot,” said study author Axel Schmidt, a geneticist at Bonn University Hospital in Germany. “And for doctors, it’s always been a mystery what was really behind it.”
Now, with advances in ancient DNA technology, researchers have been able to extract genetic clues from locks of Beethoven’s hair that were cut off and preserved as keepsakes. According to the study, they focused on five locks that are “almost certainly authentic” and come from the same European man.
They also examined three other ancient curls, but could not confirm that they were actually Beethoven’s. Previous tests on one of those curls indicated that Beethoven had suffered from lead poisoning, but researchers later concluded that the sample was actually from a woman.
After cleaning Beethoven’s hair one by one, the scientists dissolved the pieces in a solution and extracted bits of DNA, explained study author Tristan James Alexander Begg, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge.