by George Biro
The hint was enough. Nine were arrested and jailed for what came to be known as the ‘Doctors’ Plot’. Among those arrested was Stalin’s personal physician of 20 years, Dr V.N. Vinogradov. He was arrested, beaten, manacled and committed to a dungeon on the suspicion of being a British spy.
Significantly, six of the nine arrested had Jewish surnames. It was said that five had worked for American intelligence through a Jewish organisation, and three were British agents. All were distinguished, but anti-Semitism was in the air.
More letters poured in purporting medical involvement in intrigue, and Stalin allowed the Press campaign to gain momentum. Members of the Presidium felt there was a lack of substance in the accusations, but never discussed it openly, because, as Khrushchev was to write later: ‘once Stalin had made up his mind and started to deal with a problem, there wasn’t anything to do’.
The interrogations began. Stalin was in a rage and, according to Khrushchev, berated the Minister of State Security to ‘throw the doctors in chains, beat them to a pulp and grind them into powder’.
All the doctors confessed.
On 20 January 1953 Dr Timashuk was awarded the Order of Lenin.
On 1 March Stalin had a stroke. At first his fearful servants were loath to disturb the apparently sleeping chief. When they realised what had happened, all hell broke loose and his room was packed with a host of doctors, politicians and security men.
However, there was no public announcement of any illness until three days later, on 4 March. Then Radio Moscow gave the news that Comrade Stalin had lost consciousness, was unable to speak and his right leg and arm were paralysed. Nine doctors were in attendance; a group of men who no doubt harboured very mixed feelings.
The communique added that the leader’s treatment was under the constant surveillance of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government. His chances of recovery were slim anyway, but such guidance would have snuffed out any hope.
Over the next few hours a wealth of medical detail was given to show that everything possible was being done: oxygen, camphor, caffeine, strophanthin and penicillin. Leeches were applied to his head. An artificial respirator was trundled in but, as nobody could work it, it lay idle as the patient slowly choked to death.
He died on 5 March 1953, aged 73.
A fully reported post-mortem absolved the attendant medical staff from blame. Nevertheless, of the nine doctors who signed the report, one died suddenly six weeks later and two others were removed from their posts and disappeared at about the same time.
The Doctors’ Plot was Stalin’s last purge. As no more doctors were arrested after 24 February, it has been postulated that from that date he himself was no longer directing affairs. It has been claimed the stroke was on that day and there was a power vacuum until 5 March.
It has been mooted that Stalin was murdered by poison and a battery of terrorised doctors went along with the lie. To support this it is pointed out that after the first bulletin the communiques became more woolly. For instance, it was said that the albumin and red blood-cell ratio in the urine was normal, but for either matter to be there at all is abnormal.
We shall never know if he was poisoned. We do know that Dr Timashuk’s award was revoked on 4 April, a month after Stalin’s death and the day the seven remaining doctors were ultimately released. Two had been tortured to death.
(JL)
Did a stand-in take the rap for Rudolf Hess?
… on May 10, 1941 … the real Hess took off from Augsburg; a different man and a different plane reached Scotland. So much is certain. But the plot which achieved the substitution is still largely mysterious … (Dr Hugh Thomas)
History tells us that Rudolf Hess became Hitler’s deputy in Nazi Germany. On 10 May 1941, during the Second World War, Hess flew solo to Scotland—without Hitler’s knowledge—apparently to offer Britain a peace proposal. While a prisoner of the British, he showed signs of mental instability. After the war, the international court at Nuremberg sentenced him to life imprisonment. In August 1987, at the age of 93, he hanged himself in Berlin’s Spandau gaol.
But Welsh surgeon Dr Hugh Thomas agrees with Henry Ford who said ‘history is bunk’. He argues that in 1941 it was ‘an impostor who was thrust upon, or infiltrated by the British’. The real Rudolf Hess was shot down somewhere over the North Sea, perhaps on the orders of his rival, Heinrich Himmler. Moreover, the impostor did not hang himself in Spandau, but was murdered.
The following account is based on Dr Thomas’s research.
A German pilot did land in Scotland on the night of 10 May 1941. He claimed to be Rudolf Hess, in search of peace. Though thinner than Hess, this man did resemble him. But it is hard to accept the ‘confused and pathetic character’ who landed in Scotland as Hitler’s successor and designate, after Goëring. The pilot asked for talks with senior British officials, but knew little of international politics, or even of his own ‘peace proposals’.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not announce the pilot’s arrival, forbade any photos and kept him away from anyone who had known the real Hess.
Both Hitler and Goebbels announced that Hess was mentally unstable. Indeed, throughout his confinement over the remaining 46 years of his life, the prisoner’s behaviour was puzzling and difficult. At times, he pleaded loss of memory; for the first 28 years, he refused visits from his wife or any other relative.
At the Nuremberg trials of 1945–46, the court sentenced twelve war criminals to death. Though the prisoner didn’t seriously defend himself, he received only a life sentence.
By October 1972, when Dr Thomas joined the British Military Hospital in Berlin, the man known as ‘Hess’ was the only prisoner in Spandau.
Dr Thomas unearthed Rudolf Hess’s old First World War records. In 1917, he had a gunshot wound which injured his lung, kept him in hospital for four months, made him breathless and ended his active service. But a medical report at Nuremberg in 1945 showed that the prisoner had no gunshot wounds.
During the time he had been a prisoner in Britain, Hess’s British doctors had not believed his frequent complaints of stomach pains, but in Spandau, much later, he almost died of a perforated duodenal ulcer.
In 1973, the prisoner had stomach X-rays. When Hess was dressing again, Dr Thomas was close by, looking for a gunshot wound on his bare torso. But there was none. Nor did his chest X-rays show any lung damage.
One day in Spandau an officer called out for Hess. The prisoner answered: ‘Sir, there is no such person as Hess here. But if you are looking for Convict Number 125, then I’m your man.’
In late July 1987, messages reached the Foreign Office in London that a Soviet warder had reported the prisoner’s ‘loose talk’. Moreover, Soviet secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was pressing for his release, which the British privately opposed. The four powers controlling Spandau (USSR, Britain, France and USA) were to meet and decide this in late August 1987.
On 17 August the prisoner—by now very old and frail and in poor health—was resting in a garden shed after a walk. The American warder guarding him was called away to the phone in the main block.
The warder returned to find the prisoner’s head propped against a folding chair. His face was purple, and round his neck was a length of flex. The warders could not revive him.
The British insisted that only their own military police should investigate the death and that only one of their own army pathologists (rather than an international panel) should do the autopsy. They also vetoed photos, fingerprinting and genetic testing of the body.
From this autopsy, Professor J.M. Cameron of the University of London concluded that death was not due to natural causes, but to asphyxia, compression of the neck and suspension. Moreover, contrary to Rudolf Hess’s 1917 records, the prisoner had never been shot.
Though Cameron’s report did not even suggest suicide, the British media release stated that Rudolf Hess had hung himself.
In outrage, the Hess family insisted
on a second autopsy. Still no gunshot wound, but this second report stated that the prisoner had received a savage blow to the back of his head.
Finally, 26 German pathologists took nearly one year to compose a third autopsy report, which supported probable strangulation. Scotland Yard spent six months investigating the death, but British authorities suppressed its report.
Dr Thomas concludes that the prisoner was far too frail and stiff to have possibly hung himself. Instead he was struck on the head and then strangled. Furthermore, Thomas says, British authorities have continued this deception (‘one of the most shameful crimes in history’) ever since.
There is independent support for his views.
Seventy-six members of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh unanimously agreed that the prisoner who died in Spandau in 1987 could not have been the real Rudolf Hess.
(GB)
Kafka, Orwell, Camus and Auden
For many people ‘the classics’ are books they feel they ought to read, but somehow never do. This is especially true of the modern classics by, among others, Kafka, Orwell, Camus and Auden. Often these books are so tortuous that after the first few pages a reader feels he or she has the drift and puts them away for another occasion. For some, remembered books are the ones they have never read.
The authors are well-known enough, however, and a number of these moderns have had interesting medical histories.
Take Franz Kafka (1883–1924), for instance. Besides being the stimulus for a new word in the language—‘kafkaesque’, meaning ‘man’s bewilderment in a nightmarish world’—medically he had two claims to fame.
A thin, stooped, introspective man, at the age of 34 Kafka concluded that his then persistent cough was psychosomatic in origin, being initiated and stimulated, he felt, for the sole purpose of putting to an end his insoluble internal struggles. Being the reflective, introspective person he was, Kafka seems to have thought it necessary to have an explanation for every bodily function. In fact the cause was much more mundane—he had tuberculosis and was to spend half of his remaining six years in sanatoriums.
However, it was not so much the symptoms produced by the bacillus at its common location, the lung, which are of interest, but the symptoms produced from another, fairly uncommon, area for which he is best remembered medically. The germ affected the writer’s larynx, and eventually left him speechless, parched and gaunt, a victim, he claimed, of a conspiracy of his own body.
Kafka’s second connection with medicine was to do with his work. He lived in Prague and worked at his day job at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute, where his task was to assess the degree of disability caused by workplace injuries.
He was there at a time when workers’ compensation was an emerging feature of industrial life, and quickly recognised that it did not always pay to get well quickly; a clean bill of health often meant being sent away empty handed. Limbs became a commodity to be haggled over, and at night Kafka returned home to write about those more seedy aspects of human nature he had seen during the day.
Kafka always felt that he should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. When it became obvious that was not going to happen, in a fit of gallows humour he exclaimed: ‘At least I think I deserve the Nobel Prize for sputum.’
He was 40 when he died in 1924. Had he not succumbed then, a second fatal trap may have been sprung 20 years on, for his three sisters were gassed in a German concentration camp.
Another well-regarded modern writer was George Orwell (1903–50). He was born in Bengal, where his father was a minor civil-service official, and he grew up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. Nonetheless, he was bright enough to win a scholarship to Eton.
Orwell was also to die of tuberculosis in a sanatorium. Furthermore, like Kafka, he had a laryngeal condition which affected his speech. It was not a chronic infection, however, but the result of a wound to the throat sustained during the Spanish Civil War. Thereafter he spoke in an odd, strained manner.
The Algerian writer Albert Camus (1913–60), who did manage to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, contracted tuberculosis at the age of 17. As a youth he rather fancied himself as a soccer player, but the disease cut short his promising sporting career. He had several flare-ups of the disease, but, as he lived on into the era of antibiotics, he survived with the aid of their use. In the end it did him little good for he died aged 46, not of a diseased chest, but of an automobile accident.
But of this small group of modern writers it is the poet, and one of the angry young men of literature of the 1930s, W.H. Auden (1907–73), who perhaps has the most interesting medical history.
He was born in York, where his father was a general practitioner (well-off enough to employ a coachman, two maids and a cook—those were the days). The year after Auden was born the family moved to Birmingham, where his father had been appointed to a post at the university’s medical school.
Auden felt destined to be a poet from the age of 15, and his undergraduate days at Christ Church, Oxford, cemented his early aspirations.
Photographs taken in his youth show his rather florid face, thick lips and large hands and feet. Apparently he was clumsy in his movements, rather grubby in his personal habits and lived in an apartment which was to be avoided by the fastidious. He was described by Alan Bennett as: ‘scattering his ash as liberally as he did his aperçus. If one wanted to entertain Auden, the first requirement was a good carpet sweeper’.
He was a professed homosexual and his long-time lover was Chester Kallman, an undistinguished young poet who apparently, as Bennett succinctly has it, ‘went down on posterity but not to it’.
With Auden’s heavy features and thick digits, at first glance he had the appearance of an acromegalic. Acromegaly is an uncommon malady caused by a pituitary disorder. Often the first signs of the disease are when the sufferer notices that his hats have become too small and dentures ill fitting.
In Auden’s case, it was not until later in life, when he developed his famous creased, gouged and rumpled face, that the true diagnosis became apparent. He suffered not from acromegaly but from the rare Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome, also known as pachydermoperiostosis. It is a very rare syndrome, but oddly enough it seems Racine, a towering French poet and dramatist of the 17th century, was similarly affected.
The condition apparently mainly attacks males and is an inherited developmental defect. It is characterised by clubbing of the fingers and toes, coarsening of the features, a rather lugubrious expression, oiliness of the skin and marked furrowing of the scalp. (The features can indeed be confused with acromegaly, however in that condition the facial skeleton, the jaw and skull as a whole are enlarged.)
There is no therapy. It is not fatal, and progresses for five to ten years before becoming stable.
The ailment had no effect on Auden’s capacity for work, and he lived to the age of 66, dying in Vienna in 1973.
His face, while not his fortune, was a constant source of wonderment to the public. After painting Auden’s portrait, the renowned artist David Hockney surely had the final say when he remarked: ‘I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’
(JL)
5
Warfare and Medicine
Red jackets, tight trousers and cold steel: the medical aspects of the Battle of Waterloo
There was a sound of revelry by night.
And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then
Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men
(Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)
Thus wrote Byron on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball held on 15 June 1815, a function graced by the Duke of Wellington himself, no less, as well as ‘a thousand hearts beating happily when Youth and Pleasure met to chase the glowing hours with flying-feet’, to quote the poet. It was then, just when ‘joy was unconfined’ that ‘was heard the cannon’s opening roar’ of the Battle of Wat
erloo.
It all happened a long time ago, when medical care of the casualties of war was quite different from that practised today. Sterility, antibiotics, anaesthetics and rapid evacuation are the norm for the 20th century. But what was it like then?
On 1 March 1815 Napoleon had landed near Antibes in the South of France, having escaped from Elba four days earlier. Thus began the drama of the Hundred Days which reached its climax in Belgium, in the countryside just outside Brussels, near the hamlet of Waterloo.
During those three months the former Emperor had managed to gather around him 115,000 of France’s finest troops, and on the very day of the Duchess’s ball he quietly slipped over the river Sambre in the north east of that country, and, although he did not know it at the time, into military folklore. His plan was to drive a wedge between the 102,000 Anglo-Dutch-Belgium troops under Wellington and the 140,000 approaching Prussians under Marshal Blücher. Initially there was success and the Prussians were driven back to within 40 kilometres of Brussels.
Over the next three days several bloody battles were fought, culminating in the final showdown at Waterloo on 18 June. Many valorous stories are told of the brief campaign, but when the cannon fire had stopped and the smoke cleared, the chilling and sombre fact remained that all told there had been 102,000 fatal casualties including 47,000 at Waterloo itself. These latter were about equally divided between the two forces.
And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves,
Dewy with nature’s tear-drops as they pass,
Grieving, if aught inanimate e’er grieves,
Over the unreturning brave—alas!
The question is: if Byron could thus verbalise the country’s collective sorrow over the dead, how did the army deal with the daunting problem on the spot of those only marginally better off, the wounded? In a word: ingloriously. In deed and in fact, they had met their Waterloo.
