The names and biographies of important people can be found in any lexicon or online, and are described in many history books. But the names of their doctors are rarely found, even though they were often stronger than their patients at the time of their illness. What were these doctors like? Were they really top experts, doctors with ‘golden hands’ and the best specialists in the world? Or did they become doctors to important people only by chance or because of ties of friendship? Did they perhaps abuse their relationship with their patients?
We must also ask ourselves what these important people were like at a time when they had little strength left, not to mention the will to live, not to mention their plans, at a time when the shadow of death was beginning to fall over them. Could the history of the world have turned out differently if doctors had succeeded in saving their lives? As Emil Zola said, “A few grains of stone in their boots and the foundations of whole empires are shaken.” Dean Rusk, Secretary of State in the Kennedy cabinet, was no less clear: “The list of those who, when they were ill or even terminally ill, made decisions that were fatal to the world, decisions that would surely have been different if they had been healthy, is very long.”
But might this responsibility not also apply to their doctors?
The long road to a quick death
Dr Sigmund Freud took 16 years to die. The process began on an April day in 1923 in Vienna with a fairly simple operation by the surgeon Dr Hajek and ended on a foggy London day in 1939 with two injections of morphine by his long-time physician Dr Schur. Between these two events, the founder of psychoanalysis had to undergo 19 operations over a period of 16 years, performed in Vienna by Dr Pichler, in order to arrest the growth of one of the most difficult forms of cancer – cancer of the palate. The cancer first appeared as a small white mass in the oral cavity and then spread to the whole mouth and jaw.
Freud was 67 years old when he found out in 1923, and 83 when morphine relieved him of his torment. “My dear Schur,” Freud said in the last hours of his life, “of course you remember our first conversation. You promised me then that you would not let me down when it got this far. Now all this is just torture that makes no sense.” The description of this torture is not a pleasant one, but it speaks of the triumph of the spirit over the body, ultimately a body that already stank, the smell of which even Freud’s dog could no longer tolerate. The doctors did what they could, and it was not their fault that they did not do more. Because the first doctor screwed up and decided not to remove the creature completely, the subsequent surgeons had few options.
In April 1923, Freud finished his conversation lessons. His patients were sick at heart, suffering from neuroses, complexes, hysteria, death anxiety and nervous breakdowns. After ten patients a day, even Freud was at the end of his strength. But he still had night work ahead of him; he answered letters from many doctors from all over the world and wrote books dealing with hysteria, hypnosis, fears and mental inhibitions.
On that day, he felt a small lump in the sky, which had first appeared to him six years earlier. At the time, doctors attributed it to too much cigar smoking. But he couldn’t give up smoking: “If I don’t smoke, I can’t write.” At that time, the creature disappeared and Freud hoped that it would be the same now. He did not mention it to anyone, not even to his wife Anna, but the fear remained. What if it was a cancerous growth – the end of his life’s journey?
But the fistula was getting bigger every day and it was starting to hurt. Freud confided in two Viennese doctors, who, during an examination, found that the formation was cancerous, but instead of telling him the truth, they only told him half of it. The mass was dangerous, but it could be removed with minor surgery and then everything would be fine.
It is a mystery why Freud chose not to have the operation performed by the very well-known Viennese maxillofacial surgeon Dr Pichler, but by a Dr Markus Hajek, who was well-known as a pathologist but insignificant as a surgeon. The operation, during which the fang was only partially removed, was carried out in Hajek’s office rather than in the operating theatre, and Freud told no one about the operation. What would have upset the family about a trivial operation.
But going home immediately was out of the question, as he had lost a lot of blood and was temporarily placed in a side room where a dwarf was already lying; the dwarf ended up saving his life. During the night, Freud began to bleed profusely, still half dazed, and the bell he could have used to call for help did not work, so he was unable to call for help. He was saved by a dwarf who crawled to the nurse.
Freud’s wife Anna came in and demanded that the doctor on duty be called, but no one wanted to get out of bed at night. The next day, Freud was discharged and sent to the X-ray department of the medical faculty for therapy, where he was given localised radio-irradiation. The completely unnecessary therapy severely damaged his tissue and caused him pain.
Freud then went on holiday to Tyrol and Rome. He was still bleeding profusely from the mouth from time to time and could not help feeling that he would need another operation as the cancerous growth started to grow again. On his return to Vienna, he was advised to have a detailed examination, at which point Dr Pichler found that new cancerous growths had appeared and had already spread to his cheeks and lower jaw. A new jaw surgery will be needed, this time a radical jaw surgery and the insertion of a partial denture.
As a doctor, Freud knew that he was not doing well, but he expected to be able to eat and speak five weeks after the operation and to resume regular talking hours with patients on 1 November. Dr Pichler had prepared himself thoroughly for the procedure, as he had never performed such a radical operation before. He therefore went to the morgue and practised on a cadaver.
On 12 October 1923, he judged that local anaesthesia would not be enough, so he gave Freud a strong sedative. The operation lasted six hours. A large part of his upper jaw, part of his lower jaw and part of his palate were removed. It is almost unbelievable that the patient survived such a difficult operation. There were no antibiotics at the time, there was a two-day high fever, then the condition slowly began to settle down and the patient was fed through a tube through his nose.
Dr Pichler was in doubt whether he had removed enough tissue. A few weeks later, he examined the patient again thoroughly and noticed a very small mass that was pusing. The examination showed that the mass was cancerous. The disease was therefore spreading. Freud agreed to an immediate re-operation and only then was Dr Pichler convinced that the procedure was radical enough.
It is almost unbelievable that Freud, the world-famous father of psychoanalysis, then decided to go into the care of the most notorious physician in Vienna, Dr Eugen Steinbach, who dealt with the sexuality of mainly older men with very young women who wanted to get pregnant. He was besieged by old gentlemen from all over the world because of his operative method. But Fred chose him because at that time it was still believed that cancerous growths were the result of the ageing process. He underwent this harmless procedure not because of his sexual urges, but because he wanted to escape cancer and to be able to work unhindered again with his patients, whom he had not seen for almost a year. But the procedure did not improve his health.
Dr Pichler’s radical surgery proved to be successful, however, as the cancerous growths did not appear again. But Freud’s life became one of constant complaints and endless torment. No matter how hard Dr Pichler tried, the prosthesis caused Freud constant problems and the result was constant inflammation, requiring minor surgery. The prosthesis had to be repaired and adjusted again and again. Freud still had problems with speech, eating and, above all, smoking. He could not give it up, even though he knew that sooner or later the cancer would return. He never told his patients about his problems, only his best friends. “I am tired and I need peace. The best thing would be to stop my work and my commitments and wait in a corner for the end.”
Over the years, the growths kept reappearing and had to be removed surgically or by electrocoagulation and covered with transplanted skin. Years of pain and hard work, writing books and working with patients followed.
On 11 May 1933, Viennese newspapers reported that books by Jewish and anti-Nazi authors were being burned in Germany. Freud fell into a depression: ‘It seems to me that lies and phrases did not reign so unrestrained even in wartime. The world is going to become a big breeding stable, and Germany is its worst cell.”
In 1936, doctors discovered that Freud’s cancer had spread. He took the news stoically. The Nazis invaded Vienna on 11 March 1938, searched Freud’s apartment a short time later, and it was only through the intervention of US President Roosevelt and even Mussolini that he and his family were allowed to emigrate.
Freud found a new home in London and continued his work. There, he underwent nine more operations, and by mid-1939 it was realised that there was no longer any point in further operations. His skin showed signs of gangrene and he began to smell horribly.
At that time, Freud again reminded his confidant and physician Dr Schur, who was also Jewish and had followed him from Vienna, of the mutual understanding. On the night of 22-23 September 1939, Dr Schur gave the suffering patient an injection of morphine. Freud fell into a deep sleep. Some time later, Dr Schur gave him another injection of morphine. Freud’s face calmed down. He died at about 3 a.m., after sixteen years of dying. A few days before, he had written to an acquaintance and a patient:
“My world is again what it has been for so long; a small island of pain floating in an ocean of indifference.”
Red and green pills
The large lecture theatre of St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School was filled to capacity in the autumn of 1945. In addition to the young medical students, there were also many older students who, after six years, had finally taken off their military uniforms. All eyes were on the man behind the lectern. It was the first time they had seen him, but his name was known to all. He was Lord Moran, Dean of their school and, since May 1940, Winston Churchill’s personal physician. He was not a surgeon, but an excellent internist. His book, Anatomy of Courage, has just been published.
After his speech at the opening of the university year, the 62-year-old doctor left the lecture theatre. He went on to tell the students: ‘We are working too much instead of being happy. To be happy, we need temperament. If you work too much, you will go crazy. And if you go crazy, you will no longer have the temperament to be happy.”
It was known to all that he had seen more of those war years than any of his contemporaries. Everyone wondered if he would ever tell what he had experienced as the personal physician of one of the most powerful men in the world, Winston Churchill. He was there for all the important events, the conferences, the meetings, the consultations and the travels. He was Churchill’s shadow, his friend and his adviser. But it was not until twenty years later, in 1966, that students were able to read Lord Moran’s memoirs, published under the title Fighting for Survival.
A year earlier, in January 1965, the whole world mourned when Winston Churchill was laid to rest after a two-week coma. Few realised that it was a miracle that Lord Moran, who had accompanied Churchill for 25 years, had managed to keep the great statesman alive until he was 90. Churchill could have died many years before that.
In fact, at the beginning they did not tolerate each other at all, neither the statesman of the doctor nor the doctor of the statesman. But on 24 May 1940, for reasons of statesmanship, they were forced to find themselves together. The War Cabinet was convinced that Churchill was indispensable and that, because of his temperament, he had to be kept under constant surveillance.
When Lord Moran first came to see him, it was just after midday and Churchill was still in bed reading the reports. When he finally put the papers down, he looked at Lord Moran and said to him, “Why all this hullabaloo, I’m all right.” Then he went on reading, finally got out of bed and said, “I have dyspepsia and I treat myself like this.” He started doing breathing exercises. His fat belly rose and fell. Lord Moran was convinced that their collaboration would be short-lived.
Both Churchill, 65, and Lord Moran, 57, have been through a lot in their lives and it was time to start living in peace. But the turmoil of war had not allowed them to rest. Lord Moran was able to influence Churchill’s body with his red and green pills, but he could not tame his restless spirit. This was the tragedy of their collaboration, because in wartime it is not only the functioning of the body that matters, but above all the functioning of the spirit.
For the first year and a half, Churchill didn’t even need a personal doctor, except to take his pulse every day. For a well-known doctor like Lord Moran, this was not enough. Any nurse could do that job, he grumbled. Then came the hour of decision, still debated by doctors today, when Lord Moran was said to have acted contrary to medical ethics and his oath by caving in to the weight of statesmanship.
The war had already been going on for a year and a half and Churchill had tried in vain to persuade US President Roosevelt to enter the war. Britain was then looking very bad, having to fight the enemy alone, and its empire was beginning to crumble. Then came Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war. Churchill’s reaction to this event was similar to the moment when a great dam bursts and a huge amount of water rushes into a valley. Suddenly, he went from being a bitter old man to a mischievous child. “Now we have won, we have won!” Nowhere is it written that this is true, but they say that he got drunk that night.
On 12 December, Churchill sailed across the ocean in a battleship for his first meeting with Roosevelt. The night before, Lord Moran was summoned in the middle of the night because Churchill needed him. His room was in disarray, smelling of cigars, the bed was rumpled and there were American newspapers on the floor.
Lord Moran could see that Churchill was upset. His pulse was satisfactory, but he required a strong sleeping pill because he needed a quiet night before the serious and difficult talks with Roosevelt. He was given two red sleeping tablets, but they made him feel uncomfortable.
Five days later, he was again summoned urgently to Churchill. This time he was lying in bed with a frightened look on his face, complaining of pain in his left arm. The symptoms were more than clear to Lord Moran; coronary disease. The patient needed at least six weeks’ rest. The British Prime Minister was an invalid with a bad heart and an uncertain future.
It was simply not possible to tell the public at those crucial moments in the talks with the Americans. If Lord Moran had done nothing, there could have been a second heart attack, which could have been fatal. At the time, Lord Moran lied: “It’s no big deal and it’s nothing serious, it’s just that your circulation is a bit slow.” What gave him the courage to take a risk that could have meant his patient’s death? He was lucky that nothing fatal happened. When they were on their way back to England a few days later, Churchill put his hand on the doctor’s knee and said, “I am very reassured to have you with me. When I am working, I cannot think of my own heart.” And Lord Moran calmly replied, “Forget that damned heart.”
Churchill travelled some 25,000 kilometres during the war years, and Lord Morgan was always there with a shot and a pill. The pneumonia he contracted in 1943 while travelling in North Africa posed a great risk to the doctor and Churchill survived thanks to a large quantity of injections and tablets.
The November 1943 Conference of the Big Three in Tehran was a great disappointment for Churchill. Roosevelt had more or less sided with Stalin and he saw that Britain no longer played a significant role in the world. He fell into a deep depression and at night called Lord Moran to take his pulse. It was well over a hundred beats per minute, so he did not suspect anything good. He forbade Churchill to drink too much and suggested he work less.
But the Prime Minister already suspected that war with Russia might be on the cards after the war. “It will be a terrible war, much more terrible than this one. But I will be gone. I will sleep, I will sleep for a million years.” He looked like an old man, yawning and talking irrationally. Lord Moran advised him to cancel his trip to Tunis to meet Eisenhower.
The events that followed in the weeks that followed were for a long time the best-kept secret. Eisenhower took up residence in a villa where there was no hospital, no nurse, no pharmacy for miles around. And here Lord Moran was fighting the hardest battle for his patient’s life.
Churchill’s collapse began the morning after his arrival on 12 December 1943. He woke up with a temperature of 38.3 degrees. Could the pneumonia have returned? Lord Moran telegraphed Cairo and asked for a pathologist, but he could say nothing without a blood sample and an X-ray. Fortunately, they had a portable X-ray machine in Tunis. But how to get it? Lord Moran spent the whole day at the bedside of the British Prime Minister, who was visibly fading. When the doctor was about to switch off the lights and leave, Churchill said to him in a weak voice: “Stay with me. Do not go away.”
On 13 December, a pathologist, a radiologist and two nurses arrived from Cairo, bringing an X-ray machine by truck. Blood tests showed a normal picture, but X-rays showed a large shadow on the left side of the lungs. This was a sign of alarm. But when the radiologist was about to say how dangerous this thing was, Lord Moran interrupted him, gave him a nasty look and said, ‘It’s nothing serious’. He knew he could have given the patient an injection of sulphonamides, but he telegraphed London and demanded that the heart specialist fly to Cairo immediately.
As a diagnostician, he knew that Churchill’s heart might be in trouble. Churchill felt it too: “My heart is behaving strangely and beating too much. Is there nothing you can do?” There was a look of fear on his face. Dr Moran reassured him and told him that he would give him digitalis, which works like quinine. But he knew that the patient could die in the meantime.
Four hours later, my heart calmed down. Dr Moran wrote a medical message to the War Cabinet: ‘Slight cold, advise a few days in bed. Small pneumonia on left wing of lung, general condition satisfactory.” He made no mention of the suspicious rapid heartbeat, and he stuck to this tactic in subsequent reports. But as the months passed, he realised that he would have to contend with yet another annoyance. He noticed signs of senility, forgetfulness and drowsiness in the patient, and this in the man who was deciding the fate of the world.
In February 1945, at the Yalta Conference, he noticed the same signs in Roosevelt, who hardly attended the debates and just sat at the table with his mouth open. Churchill was not much better. He was constantly asking his secretary where his glasses were, even though he had them in his hand, and where the reports were, even though he had them on the table in front of him. So there Stalin, who was at the height of his physical and psychological powers, got his way. “The Prime Minister is aware of his powerlessness, but I cannot help him,” Dr Moran wrote in his diary.
Churchill also lost the election in July 1945, which hit him hard. “It is meaningless to say that I am not affected and that I must resign myself to spending the rest of my life uselessly.”
But the depressions lasted only a short time. He was still chairman of the Conservative Party, travelling, drawing. He suffered a slight stroke in Monte Carlo in 1949, but became British Prime Minister again in 1951. After eighteen months in office, he suffered a massive stroke which left him a helpless child. He could no longer speak or walk. The official message about his condition was that he was working too much and needed rest, but Lord Moran expected only his death.
“I don’t understand how I became something like this overnight, a bunch of old rags,” Churchill complained. He resigned as Prime Minister and said to Dr Moran: “I shall live for two or three more years until the end comes. If only it would come quickly, without pain and unexpectedly.”
But he lived for another 10 years. When he died, only his wife and Dr Moran were with him.
Evita must not die
The story is spiteful, though true to the last line. Nowhere does it say that this could not have happened elsewhere than in Argentina, where doctors, very famous doctors, bowed to the will of a dictator. The case we are discussing can be outlined from a medical point of view in a few sentences. In November 1951, an examination of a young, beautiful 32-year-old woman revealed cancerous growths in her abdomen, which had already progressed. Surgery would not help and the young woman had only a few weeks, perhaps months, to live. The only thing that could still be done was to reduce the pain with morphine, and the only thing the doctors could expect was that death would bring her redemption as soon as possible.
The life and death of the woman we are talking about were decided this way for reasons of state. Evita Perón’s life and death also determined the continued survival or collapse of the dictatorial Perón regime. And because the regime wanted to stay in power, Evita Perón was not allowed to die. The charisma she exuded was the only guarantee of the regime’s inviolability. Therefore, the doctors had to make sure that she lived, and they did.
Evita Perón was the idol of the masses, “the angel of the poor, the mother of the oppressed”. The road that led the illegitimate Evita, whose only wealth was her beautiful body, from the province of Argentina to Buenos Aires was almost fairytale-like. Men were crazy about her, she had a bunch of lovers, made a living as a model for titillating magazines, worked in cabarets and was the mistress of rich merchants. But she wanted more, she wanted power and influence.
She got a job at the influential Belgrano radio station, run by her lover, and in a 15-minute evening show, she spoke to ordinary people, listened to their problems, cried for their misfortune, asked listeners for help. She made a spectacle out of this short programme, which sometimes lasted half an hour. The Minister of War, Juan Perón, also listened to it, and it was here that the two honour-bearers, Perón and Evita, met. They were married in October 1945 and Perón was elected President of Argentina two months later. The poor girl from the countryside had achieved her goal.
Peronism was a strange mix of European fascism and Marxist social teaching. The Second World War had made Argentina a rich country, full of dollar reserves, and Evita shared them generously among the poor. She did not ask Perón if she could, and he was clever enough not to stand in her way when she went among the poor and gave them goodies, because it was the poor who had enabled him to win the election. His wife was the defender of the poor and the comforter of the unfortunate, and the army and the landlords cursed her.
Elections were called for autumn 1951, but no one could guarantee Perón’s victory. He needed Evita to stir up the poor masses, because for the first time women could vote. Wherever she appeared, the crowds went crazy, and wherever Perón appeared, people just applauded politely. Then Dr Tarnowski told the dictator that “Evita was a candidate for death”, although the diagnosis was not yet definitive, as Evita refused further tests.
In the opposite camp, the shadows of her past were brought to light; nude photographs, rumours that she had worked in a notorious bar in Calle Esmiraldi, had had numerous lovers and that she had contracted syphilis.
When she started to get sick, Dr Tarnowski first suspected that she was just too tired because she was working too much. But one evening Evita called him in and he was one of the few who knew how unwell she was. He was frightened when he saw her. Her face was sagging, the skin on her neck was wrinkled and she was struggling to hide her pain. As she was also running for Vice-President of the country at the time, she needed something to take the pain away for the election campaign; morphine.
Dr Tarnowski didn’t dare say no and taught her how to give herself injections. He himself could not always be by her side, as he knew she was being monitored by the secret police. He decided to give her a blood transfusion and, in the meantime, secretly take a blood sample from her, as this was the only way to know for sure how serious her condition was. Her bouts of nausea, which occurred at shorter and shorter intervals, were indicative of anaemia, if not the onset of leukaemia. But was that all? There was also the abdominal pain, which was relieved by morphine injections.
But the pain-free moments were getting shorter and shorter, and the injections had to be stronger and stronger. Tarnowski suspected cancer. But what good did his suspicions do him, he needed a clear diagnosis so that they might decide at the last minute to operate. Nevertheless, he did not dare to utter the word surgery in the presence of Evita. He cursed the day General Perón had come to him years ago to relieve the itching of his skin. Why had he been chosen to treat Evita Perón? If anything happens to her, of course it will be his fault.
With only 10 weeks to go before the elections, Evita’s only goal was to be elected Vice-President of the country. Juan Perón summoned the commanders of the army, air force and navy to assure him that they had nothing against Evita as Vice-President. The answer was a resounding no. The army will never support a woman of dubious reputation.
On 2 September, Evita spoke to her followers on the radio. But instead of speaking enthusiastically, she spoke quietly, almost without accents. She made it clear that she was giving up her candidacy for Vice-President of the country. What happened? Who forced her to give this resignation? Perhaps Juan Perón himself, perhaps the leader of the powerful trade union movement, Jose Espejo, or even the army?
Evita was deeply disappointed. Dr Tarnowski had to give her two injections of morphine a day. In her resentment, she confided in the trade union leader José Espejo, who had been her confidant for many years. He was, of course, no sucker. He knew that Evita Perón would not become Vice-President, but also that she must not die. It was therefore necessary to get the right diagnosis, even though Evita refused any investigation. No one is happy to give up power and its privileges.
The plot to achieve this goal was hatched by José Espejo and Evita’s brother, Juan Duarte, who became extremely rich after Evita’s ascent. The plan was both simple and terrifying. Instead of a daily injection of morphine, Evita would be given an anaesthetic injection and searched while unconscious. Before the anaesthetic wore off, she would be returned to her home. That way, she would not remember what had happened to her. To achieve this goal, however, they needed a doctor, and that was to be Dr Tarnowski.
Someone else wanted to investigate Evita Perón. It was Dr Ricardo Finochietto, head of the Buenos Aires Polyclinic, the most modern medical facility in South America. Evita had taken millions and millions of dollars from the state budget to build and equip this polyclinic. All patients were treated here free of charge. Dr Finochietto bowed to the threat of the conspirators that he would lose his post as head of the polyclinic if he did not cooperate in the investigation of the drugged Evita.
So a Red Cross van took the unconscious Evita to the clinic, where they took blood and tissue and performed a gynaecological examination. Dr Finochietto himself carried out the necessary tests in the clinic’s laboratory, twice and then a third time. Evita had a malignant carcinoma in her abdomen. Only surgery could tell how far it had spread, but blood tests showed advanced leukaemia.
At the beginning of October, a nondescript man with a small black suitcase stepped off a plane from Buenos Aires at New York airport. Inside were some dias and some manuscripts. The man’s name was Dr Abel Carcano. He took a taxi to Memorial Hospital to see Dr George Pack, the best cancer specialist at the time. Dr Pack and Dr Carcano, who was, of course, none other than Dr Tarnowski, knew each other in passing.
After learning of Evita’s illness in Buenos Aires, the highest Peronist authority decided that she should be operated on. If she does not agree to the operation, she will be forced to undergo it. Dr Pack agreed to operate on her. The day of the operation was to be decided by the Peronist junta. They were convinced that Juan Perón would win the election for the second time as President of Argentina and that when he appeared on the balcony of the palace to triumph his election, Evita Perón, the harbinger of the new Argentina, would have to stand beside him.
Dr Pack got on a plane, travelled to Buenos Aires and waited to be called into the operating theatre. After a four-hour operation, Evita Perón was brought out of the operating theatre on 6 November 1951. Now the doctors knew that their blackest premonitions had come true. Dr. Pack had performed a complete abdominal operation to remove part of the colon and part of the small intestine because of the cancer’s spread. Cancerous growths also appeared on the lungs, but nothing could be done.
Someone said too much and crowds gathered outside the clinic; women knelt, men crossed themselves, flowers were everywhere. Three days after the operation, Evita woke up and the next day was election day. She had to speak on Radio Belgrano. Half unconscious and hooked up to tubes feeding her blood plasma and nutrients, a microphone was thrust into her hands and in a weak, barely audible voice she spoke a few sentences and called for Juan Perón to be elected.
Two weeks after the operation, Dr. Tsukamoto, a radiation specialist, arrived from Tokyo. Although he saw that there was nothing he could do, at Perón’s insistence, he started light irradiation and Evita’s condition improved, although she received regular injections of morphine because her pain had recurred. She was speaking again and receiving visitors.
On 4 June, Juan Perón is sworn in as President of the country. With the last of her strength, Evita put on a Dior dress and a fur coat and got into the car that took her to the Presidential Palace. But she could no longer get out of the Cadillac. The car drove her back to the residence and she never left.
Dr Finochietto kept inviting specialists from all over the world to the hospital, even though he knew it was a waste of time and kept lying that there was still hope. Evita Perón died on 26 July at half past ten in the evening. Juan Perón, too, could not stay in power much longer and fled to Paraguay in October 1955. The glass coffin with Evita’s embalmed corpse, which had been on display in the trade union hall, disappeared to an unknown destination under the new rulers. It passed through Bonn, Rome and Milan to Madrid, where Juan Perón was living in exile, and was placed in the attic of a villa.
Perón returned to Argentina in 1973 and planned the triumphant repatriation of Evita Perón’s corpse. In July 1974, death prevented him from doing so.
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Cells for rejuvenation
Although the scene was banal and mundane, it ended up in court. One summer day in 1938, a grain of sand fell into the eyes of Cardinal and Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli. The Cardinal was one of the most powerful men in the Vatican and everyone was convinced that he would be the one to sit on the throne of the Holy See after the death of Pope Pius XI. He was also known to love to wander the streets of the Eternal City dressed as an ordinary priest.
His eye began to hurt and the Roman sun was mercilessly blinding him. Dr Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi, operations and consultancy, still managed to make out the front of a house. He entered it. For the ophthalmologists, removing the grain of sand was a procedure that took no more than three minutes. After the procedure, Dr Galeazzi Lisi, then 46 years old, engaged in a lengthy conversation with the ascetic and gaunt 62-year-old cardinal, and thus began his career as personal physician to the future Pope.
When the Cardinal left the surgery, he knew all about Dr Galeazzi Lisi; assistant professor at the Eye Clinic, expert in surgery and internal medicine, and chief physician at the Fate Bene Fratelli Hospital in Rome. What he did not know was that the doctor was involved in motor racing and was a regular participant in the “dolce vita” of the Roman aristocratic circles. Pacelli, who was also a diplomat, was not one of those who liked to find out who was who.
Rescued from the grain of sand in his eye, the Cardinal now had other things to worry about. The world was sliding into the Second World War and in Germany, a country he knew well, where he had been papal nuncio for many years, 1493 Catholic priests were already imprisoned in Dachau. Then, in those tragic days, the church bells announced the death of Pope Pius XI. For days, thousands of faithful waited in the area in front of St Peter’s Church for the white smoke to appear and announce: “Habemus Papam.” The news, greeted with joy by the faithful, was: “We have a Pope, His Eminence Cardinal Pacelli, who has given himself the name Pius XII.”
Dr Galeazzi Lisi heard the news of the new Pope’s election on the radio and when he walked into the surgery the next morning, the phone rang. The conversation was brief, after which the doctor took out his medical bag with injections and medicines, cotton wool and some sterile fluid. A black limousine with SVC plates was waiting for him outside the surgery and hurried through the streets of Rome towards the Vatican. The Pope fell and injured himself, someone told him.
So Dr Galeazzi Lisi came to the Vatican in the spring of 1939. After a fall in the Sistine Chapel, the Pope had a severe pain in his arm that would not go away, and he remembered the doctor who had quickly and successfully removed a grain of sand from his eye. The injury was minor, only the elbow was a little swollen, and the whole thing was not noteworthy. But word spread quickly around the Vatican that the Pope had his own personal doctor. Of course, no one had any idea that he would take such cold-blooded advantage of his patient’s trust for the sake of money. The truth only came out after nineteen years.
To this day, it is not clear who summoned Dr Galeazzi Lisi from the Vatican on that fateful day of 2 March 1939 to come to the new Pope. Who had unlimited influence on the new Pope at that time? An influence that had to do with the everyday problems of an ageing man. The answer to this is surprising, almost mysterious. It was a German, a nun of the Franciscan order with the bourgeois name of Lehnert, who was called Sister Pasqualina.
In 1915, Pacelli, then Papal Nuncio in Munich, needed someone to run his household, and Sister Pasqualina became his assistant, first in Munich, then in Berlin and then in Rome. “What Sister Pasqualina undertakes is, so to speak, already done”, said the Vatican. And it was undoubtedly Sister Pasqualina who first called Dr Galeazzi Lisi to the Pope’s aid.
Dr Galeazzi Lisi, of course, immediately spread the word around Rome that he had become the Pope’s personal physician, and by sucking up he also managed to win the confidence of Sister Pasqualina. Thus, nothing stood in the way of his career as an ophthalmologist, and over the years Pope Pius XII bestowed on him various honorific titles, such as Major of the Pontifical Guard, Physician General of the Vatican and member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, among them Alexander Fleming, the inventor of penicillin.
For the next fifteen years, Pius XII, unlike his personal physician, did not have an easy job. There was the bombing of Rome, the shooting of hostages not far from the Via Appia Antica, the fall and assassination of Mussolini, the arrival of the Americans in Rome, and a few other things that put him in a strange light. Dr Galeazzi Lisi, however, did not have much to do with the Pope during those years. He was not seriously ill until he was very old, and even when he felt unwell and exhausted, because he worked for up to twenty hours a day, he bore it stoically, as well as the constant pressure in his lower abdomen.
Cardinal La Palma once wrote something that many popes have also held: ‘Popes have the right to suffer from only one illness, namely, that which leads them to death. As long as they do not die, they are always healthy enough.”
Dr Galeazzi Lisi was astute enough to realise this and played the role of the Pope’s personal physician accordingly. He never examined him physically, never saw his body. He only suggested various diets when the Pope had digestive problems. And chamomile tea for insomnia, which was becoming more and more of a problem, sedatives and vitamins for exhaustion and colds.
The real test came 14 years later, in the autumn of 1953. The Pope was at the end of his physical strength, sleeping only two hours a day. The 77-year-old had lost weight and looked like a skeleton, and was plagued by infections, as he was constantly receiving strangers into his audience. Dr Galeazzi Lisi increasingly clung to the opinions of various specialists and simply advised the Pope on what to do. During these years, however, he began to practise rejuvenation therapy, which was not only considered questionable by the experts, but also frivolous, quackish and irresponsible.
The leading figure in this theory was the Swiss Dr Paul Niehans, for a time an evangelical theologian. According to some, he was achieving great success with cell therapy, which was supposed to help to eliminate insomnia and other problems associated with ageing. Pope Pius XII cautiously said that he would not mind if he met him.
In the autumn of 1953 Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, gave a concert in Rome. The programme included music by Beethoven, of whom the Pope was particularly fond, as he used to spin his records at night when he couldn’t sleep. The concert was also broadcast on Rome’s radio and the Pope expressed his wish to meet the conductor. The two men met and it was then that Furtwängler mentioned to him that he was only able to conduct thanks to Niehans’ rejuvenating fresh cell therapy.
Furtwängler was a wanted man in 1945 for having too close a relationship with the Nazi regime, so he took refuge in Switzerland and met Niehans there. He advised the Pope to consult Dr Niehans about his insomnia, who was also visiting Rome at the time – accidentally or deliberately. The Pope did not immediately respond to the offer and Dr Galeazzi Lisi began to press him to undergo a rejuvenating cell treatment. He thought that if he succeeded, it would be a great success for him too, but if it didn’t work, no one could blame him. Finally, Sister Pasqualina, who was anything but the Pope’s housekeeper, nodded. She read a lot and knew a lot and was interested in countless things.
In October 1953, Pope Pius XII received Niehans at his summer private residence in Castel Gandolfo, but the conversation was not successful, as Niehans first demanded that the Pope should rest completely for a week and not receive any visitors. Although the Pope refused to listen, Niehans saw in him the key to global success, but of course he was also aware of the risks. In a condition as bad as the Pope’s, the therapy could have adverse side-effects. But the Pope was hardly asleep and he wanted to help him.
When there was no reply from the Pope, he took the train home to Geneva. A few days before Christmas, he wrote to the Pope asking if he was willing to undergo his therapy. He only received a reply from Dr Galeazzi Lisi, saying that the Pope was getting worse every day, that he was no longer sleeping at all, and that he continued to walk and move with the greatest difficulty.
Then, at a modest lunch, the Pope suddenly started to get hiccups, and despite all the measures taken, they did not stop. Of course, Dr Galeazzi Lisi knew the cause; stomach problems, disturbances in the autonomic and central nervous systems and the brain, and calcification of the blood vessels. His diagnosis was correct; the causes had to be sought in the stomach and an X-ray had to be taken. The Pope refused to do so, as he did not want to expose his body to the eyes of strangers, and the hiccups still persisted. The following days, and then for the next two weeks, all his audiences had to be cancelled.
Sister Pasqualina, with tears in her eyes, begged the Pope to call another doctor, as Dr Galeazzi was clearly unable to help Lisa. The terminally ill Pope nodded slightly and Sister Pasqualina immediately telephoned Dr Niehans in Geneva. He replied that he would come immediately.
When he approached the Pope’s bedside after his arrival, he just silently moved back. In front of him lay a dead man, still breathing. The Pope said to him in a weak voice: “Thank you for coming, I trust you.” He agreed that he could be examined. Dr Niehans immediately concluded that the hiccups were caused by gastritis and blood clots in the stomach and started therapy. He massaged his abdomen, prescribed tablets to calm him down and gave him ice water in small amounts.
The Pope showed little improvement, so the next day Dr Niehans gave him an injection of rejuvenating cells to regenerate his stomach. He never said what cells he injected, probably a combination of liver, stomach and testicular cells. Niehans’ treatment lasted six weeks, the Pope slept for a few hours for the first time, his hiccups stopped and in April he went for a short walk in the Vatican gardens. “We have a Pope again!” the Romans exclaimed.
The following spring, Dr Niehans gave the Pope an additional injection of cells. Summer came and the Pope collapsed screaming in Castel Gandolfo while lifting something. Dr Galeazzi Lisi came and told him to rest, and that was all he did. Any medical student would have immediately suspected a bleeding stomach.
The Pope vomited during the night and was unable to keep food down. Dr Niehans came and consulted specialists. After a long argument, they decided that the operation was too risky. Fortunately, the Pope recovered slightly. In October 1958, he collapsed again, and the doctors diagnosed a cerebral thrombosis, which spelled the end.
Pius XII died on 9 October 1958 at 4 am. Soon Italian newspapers published photographs of the dying Pope with tubes in his mouth, secretly taken by Dr Galeazzi Lisi, followed by diary accounts of the Pope’s last days, carefully written by his personal physician. For all this, Dr Galeazzi Lisi was paid a huge fee. He was banned from practising medicine by the medical profession, which he of course appealed against. The proceedings dragged on in the courts for ten years, until Galeazzi Lisi’s death in November 1968.
Electric shocks
There were no witnesses to what happened on 2 July 1961 in a two-storey house in Ketchum, a small village in the US state of Idaho. It was a sunny day, farmers were already in the fields and fishermen were dipping their hooks in the river. None of them heard the echo of the lightning that threw Mary, Hemingway’s fourth wife, out of bed, coming from the downstairs porch of their house. She hurried downstairs and saw her husband, whose silver double-barrelled hunting rifle had slipped from his hand. The shot from the double-barrelled rifle had disfigured his head beyond recognition.
There was no point in calling a doctor. It was not until midday that Mary summoned the strength to inform the local police, who wrote down what Mary had told them: ‘Mr Hemingway accidentally shot himself this morning at 7.30 while cleaning his rifle’.
News agencies have already reported the death of the well-known writer this afternoon. Many newspapers were reluctant to confirm the news, remembering all too well that they had published the news of his death three times before, only to have to retract it the following day.
His death was first reported in May 1944. At the time, Hemingway was covering the Allied invasion of Normandy as a war reporter. On 16 May, he arrived in London and the news of his arrival spread through the city. He threw a big party at the hotel, drinking and dancing until the early hours. He had many conversations with Dr Gorer, a cancer specialist, because he imagined that he had skin cancer because of his constant wandering on the seas. Dr Gorer just laughed and took him to his hotel at 5 am.
They had only driven a few kilometres in the dark night when the car crashed into a water tank. Hemingway’s head hit the windscreen and his face became a mask of blood. He was presumed dead at a nearby hospital and someone called the Daily Express to tell them the sad news. As Hemingway lay on the operating table, the news spread rapidly around the world. Surgeons stitched up his 27 wounds and, three days later, knew he would survive.
The second time, he is said to have died nine years later in Africa. The slopes of snow-capped Kilimanjaro and the roar of the lions had an uncanny attraction for him. He wanted to make his wife Mary happy, so he hired a Cessna plane with a pilot. They flew to the wild Ngorongoro Crater near the Serengeti Plain and Queen Victoria Falls. They were circled twice, as Mary wanted to photograph them. The third time, a flock of birds crossed the plane’s path. The pilot tried to avoid them and steered the plane downwards, hitting a telegraph wire across the river. The propeller broke, the plane started to fall and after five kilometres crashed into the bushes.
Miraculously, no one was injured. The pilot radioed for help but received no reply. The next morning, a rescue plane flew over the area and rescuers saw the wreckage of the plane on the ground, but no passengers. And once again, the world was shocked by the news of Hemingway’s death. By then, after hours of walking through the thicket, the three passengers were on board a larger boat hired by a traveller to see Victoria Falls.
In the late afternoon, he stopped in Butiaba, a godforsaken nest where a two-seater De Havilland was parked in a small grassy area. It looked OK enough, but the pilot was acting a bit more adventurous. Everybody boarded the plane, it took off, started to rock and soon crashed to the ground and started to burn. All the indications were that the newspapers would not have to correct the news of the writer’s death.
But they all survived and a policeman in Butiaba took them to Masindi, 80 kilometres away. The local doctor found Hemingway to have a severe concussion, a lacerated kidney, intermittent visual and hearing disturbances and contusions on his spine, a dislocated right arm, first-degree burns on his face and arms.
The writer was pronounced dead for the third time on 8 August 1960, when a Swedish news agency announced that he had died in Chiana, near Malaga. When Hemingway read this in the newspaper, he quickly announced to his wife: “Ernst does not die so quickly.”
His body did seem invincible, but it was full of wounds. There were also the wounds from the First World War, which he received when an Austrian shell exploded near him. He was 19 years old and had volunteered as an ambulance driver for an Italian Red Cross unit. He was in hospital for three months, half of the time bandaged from head to toe.
In two operations, doctors removed 227 small grenade fragments from his right leg. There was a serious risk that his leg would be amputated. At that time he wrote to his father in America: “I have seen death and I know it well. If I had to die, it would be the simplest thing in the world. It is far better to die in a happy youth, not yet robbed of illusions, to depart in a blaze of light, than to be old, worn out and without illusions.”
Over the years, many other wounds and scars followed, from safaris in Africa, fiestas in Pamplona, Spain, when he got too close to young bulls, car accidents and fishing boat rides in the open Caribbean. Doctors always managed to patch him up. In July 1951, however, his fishing boat Pilar was caught in a storm on the high seas and he took refuge in the fishing village of Rincon. Suddenly, he was caught by a strong wave, lost his balance, fell and hit his head on a steel edge. Blood flowed in streams.
His wife Mary quickly bandaged him up and drove him to Havana in a rental car, where he was patched up. The wound was deep and the doctor was convinced that he had escaped death only by a miracle. A seemingly happy scenario, but after that event the writer became a different man. “I don’t know what to do with myself. I am full of depression, but don’t get me wrong,” he wrote to a friend. “I don’t need a psychiatrist’s couch to understand the causes of my depressions. I’m bored. But it’s all treatable, one way or another. A few days ago, I dived at least 2000 metres in the sea. I kept sinking deeper and deeper and exhaling air. It was very pleasant and the temptation to stay down there was very strong.”
For the first time, the thought occurred to him that he might need doctors other than surgeons.
He still loved to drink, and after those first signs of depression, he started reaching for a bottle in the morning. He enjoyed inventing new recipes for strong alcoholic drinks. One of these recipes even became the drink of choice in all the famous bars of the world. Over the years, Hemingway became increasingly self-doubting, even though he was at the height of his fame when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Mary saw that he was in trouble and tried to help him. “I held him back. But if I was even so considerate, he resented my running. It made him drink more. But what was I supposed to do, watch him destroy himself?”
What his wife failed to do, a Madrid doctor succeeded. Hemingway was diagnosed with advanced liver disease, inflamed heart muscle and high cholesterol. He prescribed a strict diet of no more than a glass of wine with meals, a little whisky and – nobody understood this – temporary abstinence from sexual intercourse.
At the time, Hemingway was 55 years old, very thin and losing his hair, and the skin on his face was starting to peel. He looked like an old man. He was dieting, even though it was unbearable for him given his lifestyle. When he could no longer stand it, he started going to other doctors for advice. Dr Schwartz, an internist in Paris, said: “He lay on his bed, smiled softly at me and, like a child, submitted to all my examinations without protest.”
When he was returning to America by ship from Europe, the ship’s doctor gave him strong vitamin injections and anti-cholesterol medication. It took two years for his physical health to improve. But he told no one about his increasing depression, his fixed ideas that were slowly turning into a haunting and his fear of becoming a mental patient. Only his wife Mary and a few of those closest to him suspected that his soul was shrouded by ever stronger shadows. This was something completely different from his novels, where the heroes were full of strength and passion, even if death was ultimately stronger than strength and courage.
Sometimes he felt as good as he used to, other times he was completely apathetic and stared blankly ahead with an absent gaze. He wanted less and less to go on fiestas, to make friends and to hunt. Once, sitting with friends in a tavern, he suddenly jumped up and ran away, convinced that two FBI agents were chasing him. “I’m being followed because I’ve corrupted young people with my novels,” he later told his astonished friends.
He was also convinced that he had a terminal eye disease. “My eyes are no longer working for me. I can’t see a damn word anymore, even in the morning, but at ten o’clock in the morning, nothing more. ” He believed that blindness was his destiny. In reality, he just needed stronger glasses.
When two professors from the University of Montana visited him to ask him to speak to the students, they were surprised: “Only his face looked like the person we imagined. He had lost a lot of weight and moved like a little old man. He spoke words and no sentences. We were convinced that he had severe physical and mental problems.”
His doctor, Dr Georg Saviers, found that a writer’s blood pressure is normally high when his work is progressing well, but rises sharply when he is mentally stressed or depressed. Increasingly, he would stand in front of a display case of hunting rifles, pick them up and examine them. Dr Saviers was convinced that he should be examined by a psychiatrist.
Everyone was surprised when Hemingway agreed to go to the Mayo Clinic for a while, but only on condition that the news remained secret. On 30 September, he was admitted to the clinic and isolated in a room with bars on the windows. Dr Rutt first treated his liver, while Dr Romes, a psychiatrist, took a closer look at his psyche.
The organic tests were satisfactory, showing only an enlarged liver and mild diabetes. His mental state was worse. He was treated twice a week with electric shocks to try to stop the depression, recurrent memory loss and hauntings. But Hemingway was convinced that his room was bugged and that the doctors included FBI agents. One day he was disjointed and schizophrenic, the next he was endlessly friendly with the doctors.
On 22 January 1961, he was discharged from the clinic in the hope that his condition had improved. But the improvement lasted only a few weeks, and then the depressions returned, worse than ever. He was again found with a rifle and cartridges in his hands. Dr Saviers came quickly and took him to a nearby hospital, where he was sedated. When they tried to take him to the Mayo Clinic for the second time in a chartered plane, he tried to throw himself between the propellers, which were spinning at full speed.
Again, electroshock treatment was administered and the patient was discharged from the clinic. Hemingway was happy and in good spirits, even singing in the restaurant. Then came the morning of 2 July 1961, when he took a gun from a display case, loaded it, put the barrel in his mouth and fired. He could no longer bear the world behind bars, he had become one of those about whom his novels were written: “He had gone back to the hills he loved and now he would always be part of them”.
