Treatment of the Patient
Gerhard von Breuning, prejudiced as he was against Dr. Wawruch, was yet far from unqualified in his praise of Malfatti. He says:
But the usually brilliant physician seems to have been little inspired in the presence of Beethoven. The frozen punch which he prescribed to restore the tone of the digestive organs, excessively weakened by Wawruch’s overload of medicaments, had, indeed, the desired restorative effect; but it was too transient. On the other hand a sort of sweat-bath prescribed a few days after the second[169] operation was so obviously injurious to the patient, filled with longing and hope, that it had to be abandoned at once. Jugs filled with hot water were arranged in a bath-tub and covered thickly with birch leaves on which the patient was seated, all of his body but the head being covered with a sheet. Malfatti hoped for a beneficient action upon the skin and to put the organs into a productive perspiration. But the very opposite effect resulted. The body of the patient, which had been emptied of its water by the scarcely completed tapping, attracted the moisture developed by the bath like a block of salt; it swelled visibly in the apparatus and in a few days compelled the introduction anew of the tube into the still unhealed puncture.
The story of this sweat-bath needs to be told, if for no other reason than because it is the basis of another of the romances still current, which were retailed for the single purpose of presenting Beethoven as a sufferer from the niggardliness of Johann. On January 25 (the date is fixed by a remark of Johann’s in the Conversation Book) Schindler brought word to Beethoven that the mother of the singer Fräulein Schechner had sent for him that morning to tell him about two remedies which had proved efficacious in the case of her father, who had also been afflicted with dropsy. One of these was Juniperberry tea, the other a vapor bath from a decoction, the ingredients of which were a head of cabbage, two handfuls of caraway seeds and three handfuls of hayseed (Heublumen). These remedies had been prescribed by the physician of the late King of Bavaria and had worked a cure in the case of Madame Schechner’s father when he was 70 years old. Dr. Malfatti seems to have been told of these remedies and to have prescribed the bath, which, it is said in the Conversation Books, he recognized at once as a cure used by Dr. Harz, the Royal Physician mentioned. Within a day or two Schindler notes in the book, that he had asked Johann for some hay and the latter had replied that his hay was not good enough for the purpose; but the next day, on seeing the hay, which had been procured from another source, Johann had said that he had plenty of that sort and that his was dryer. Unwilling, apparently, to admit that Johann might have been honest in his belief that the hay from his stable was not fit for medicinal purposes, Schindler writes for Beethoven’s perusal: “Is it not abominable that he is unwilling even to give hay for a single bath!” Yet this monster of inhumanity, unwilling to sacrifice even a wisp of hay for a dying brother, was at the time in daily attendance upon that brother and had taken upon himself a great deal of the onerous and disagreeable labor of the sick-room!
Among Beethoven’s visitors in February, near the end of the month, when Beethoven was at an extremity of his suffering, was the singer Demoiselle Schechner, who almost forced her way to the bedside to tell him of her great admiration for his music, of her successes in “Fidelio,” and that it was through singing his “Adelaide” that she had won her way to the operatic stage. Under date of February there also came to the composer a cheery letter from his old playmate Wegeler, calling to his mind some of his early flames—Jeanette Honrath and Fräulein Westerholt—and playfully outlining a plan by which the old friends might enjoy a reunion: he would send, he said, one of his patients to Carlsbad and go there with him as soon as Beethoven should arrange also to go there for his convalescence. Then, after a three weeks’ trip through South Germany, there should be a final visit to the home of their childhood. And, as before, Eleonore sends a postscript emphasizing the pleasures of the reunion. Beethoven answered the letter on February 17, and told his old friend how he had tried to send him a letter and portrait through Stephan von Breuning on December 10, but the plan had miscarried. Now the matter was to be entrusted to the Schotts.
Zmeskall, faithful to the old friendship, a bound prisoner to his room through gout, sends greetings and inquiries through Schindler. From his sick-bed Beethoven answers him, not in the jocular spirit which marked his voluminous notes of old, but in terms which breathe sincerity and real friendship:
A thousand thanks for your sympathy. I do not despair. The most painful feature is the cessation of all activity. No evil without its good side. May heaven but grant you amelioration of your painful existence. Perhaps health is coming to both of us and we shall meet again in friendly intimacy.
Comfort Received from England
Though Beethoven had received the Handel scores in December, he does not seem to have had an opportunity to enjoy Stumpff’s gift thoroughly until he turned to them for intellectual refreshment on his bed of pain. He had signed the receipt for them in December, but it was not until his thoughts turned to his English friends in the hope of pecuniary relief that he wrote a letter to Stumpff under date of February 8.[170]
How great a joy the sending of the works of Handel of which you made me a present—for me a royal present!—this my pen cannot describe. An article about it was even printed by the newspaper, which I enclose. Unfortunately I have been down with the dropsy since the 3rd of December. You can imagine in what a situation this places me! I live generally only from the proceeds of my brain, to make provision of all things for myself and my Carl. Unhappily for a month and a half I have not been able to write a note. My salary suffices only to pay my semi-annual rent, after which there remains only a few hundred florins. Reflect now that it cannot yet be determined when my illness will end, I again be able to sail through the air on Pegasus under full sail. Doctor, surgeon, everything must be paid.