Ronald Wharton writes: >Beethoven's deafness, whatever the cause was, was a sensorineural hearing >loss, not a conductive hearing loss, as would be the case if there were a >problem with the ossicles. This is clear in Beethoven's own descriptions >of his hearing loss dating back to the late 1799s, in which he describes >difficulty with high pitched sounds, and with certain vowels (ref: >Thayer's Life of Beethoven, ed. Forbes). Earlier. In the Heiligenstadt Testament Beethoven suggests that it had started in about 1796/97. The first sign seemed to have been tinnitus, immediately followed by a declination of the hearing. However, it stayed on the same level until about 1812/13. Then it worsened. Again it stayed on the same level. Until about 1816/17. Then it worsened and obviously quite suddenly. This time the process didn't stop. In about 1824 Beethoven was almost stonedeaf. However, as late as 1825 he was still able to hear the very high-pitched scream of a little girl. As for the cause: consensus is still far away. Frimmel, a doctor and one of the best biographers Beethoven ever had, firstly voted for post traumatic sensorineural, but later on he changed his opinion and suggested syphilis. Schweisheimer, a doctor, returned to sensorineural, though caused by a disease. Jacobsohn, also a doctor, strongly disagreed. He became the most ardent defender of the syphilis hypothesis. That was the beginning of a heated discussion that lingered on until the fifties. Then it stopped for some decades. In the eighties the discussion revived and these days it's a hot topic again. See below for a short list of the diagnoses, suggested by the various medical experts over the years: 1. post typhus/meningitis (Weissenbach, 1816, after a talk with Beethoven himself) 2. post traumatic sensorineural (Frimmel, 1880) 3. syphilis - meningiovascular (Jacobsohn, 1910, followed by Frimmel) - congenital (Koz-Forest, 1905) - early (McCabe, 1958) 4. sensorineural, maybe caused by an unknown disease in about 1787 (Schweisheimer, 1923) 5. otosclerosis (Sorsby, 1930) 6. vascular insufficiency (Stevens/Hemenway, 1970) 7. cochlear otosclerosis (Stevens/Hemenway, 1970, they changed their minds) 8. Paget's disease (Naiken, 1971) 9. iatrogenic (Gutt, 1970) 10. otosclerosis (Neumayr, 1987) 11. cochlear otoscleroris (Bankl/Jesserer, 1987) 12. auto-immune sensorineural (Davies, 1988) 13. mixed conductive and sensorineural, worsened by the doctors themselves (O'Shea, 1990) And lead poisoning is the dernier cri, suggested by Walsh last year and strongly denied by Davies in the latest issue of The Beethoven Journal. I give this hypothesis little, very little chance. Joyce Maier (mail to: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]) www.ademu.com/Beethoven