How They Croaked by Georgia Bragg

Author:Georgia Bragg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781547614530
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2023-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Since there were no such things as photographs to remember him by, a friend summoned an artist to make a drawing of Beethoven shortly before he slipped into unconsciousness.

On March 26, 1827, Beethoven died. He was fifty-six years old.

After he died, souvenir hunters took snips of his hair. Some got snips when nobody was looking, some paid for snips, and some had already snipped his hair before he was officially dead. By the end of the day, he was completely bald. Keeping locks of hair as mementos was a quirky custom, but a common one before photography.

The doctors cut Beethoven’s body open and performed an autopsy. All his inside parts were too small or too big, too soft or too hard—the opposite of what they should have been. The autopsy folks sliced Beethoven’s skull crosswise at the top; they wanted to look inside his famous head to see if they could detect what made him so special. They took out his temporal bones to study them. But, mysteriously, the bones disappeared, and a little while later the autopsy reports disappeared, too.

To remember what he looked like, wet plaster was smashed into the contours of Beethoven’s face to make a thing called a death mask. It was unpleasant and hard to do because, from the eyebrows up, the top of Beethoven’s skull had been sawed through at the autopsy the day before.

Twenty thousand fans came to his funeral. A ring of white roses was placed on his head to hide the mess they had made at the autopsy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.