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Mozart dies of strep infection: Study
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the 35-year-old composer, died on Dec. 5, 1791, and it took a whole week for a Berlin newspaper to announce that he had been poisoned.
The actual cause of death, a new study suggests, may have been more pedestrian: a strep infection.
Now researchers writing in Tuesday's issue of The Annals of Internal Medicine have done an epidemiological analysis that suggests he was a victim of an epidemic streptococcal infection.
Deaths were routinely recorded in 18th-century Vienna, but physicians were not required to note a cause, which was usually provided by relatives or the clerk doing the paperwork.
These records have survived, and the researchers used them to figure out patterns of death in the months surrounding Mozart's final illness -- November and December 1791 and January 1792 -- and compare them with the patterns in the same periods of the previous and following years.
The scientists found 5,011 deaths of people 18 and older over the nine months. The most common causes were tuberculosis, malnutrition, edema (swelling of tissue under the skin), gastrointestinal disease and cerebrovascular disease, the blood vessel disorder that leads to stroke.
But in the winter of 1791-92, edema was the only cause that showed an increased incidence among younger men compared with the other years, suggesting a small epidemic of infectious disease. Edema is also associated with certain chronic diseases of the kidneys and heart, but Mozart's sickness was sudden.
In addition to the edema, Mozart had malaise, back pain and a rash, all symptoms of streptococcal infection. Streptococcus is sometimes followed by an acute kidney disease called glomerulonephritis, which would explain the severe swelling that Mozart's sister-in-law recalled, said Dr. Richard H. C. Zegers, an ophthalmologist at the University of Amsterdam, the lead author.
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