These are not certainties; they are possibilities that the 2023 study has made more tractable by providing authenticated reference material. Before the study, any further biological investigation of Beethoven would have faced the same authentication problem that the Hiller Lock exposed: how to be confident that the material being studied is actually Beethoven’s. The five authenticated locks, and the genome derived from them, now provide a benchmark against which other claimed Beethoven material can be tested.
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## Deafness, Medicine, and the Limits of Historical Diagnosis
The medical history of the deaf is intertwined with the history of attempts to explain, cure, and sometimes exploit hearing loss. In Beethoven’s time, the etiology of hearing loss was poorly understood, treatments were empirical rather than mechanistic, and physicians had no way to distinguish between the many different conditions that can cause deafness. What they could observe was the progression of a patient’s hearing over time and the patient’s subjective reports of symptoms.
The treatments that Beethoven’s various physicians prescribed reflect the state of medical knowledge and practice in early nineteenth-century Vienna. Herbal preparations, baths, and changes of air reflected the belief that constitutionally based illnesses required constitutional treatments. The application of blistering bark—a preparation that caused controlled burns on the skin—reflected the theory that drawing out humors or stimulating the body’s vital forces through the skin could counteract internal imbalances. Electrical stimulation—using the early galvanic cells that were then being explored as medical tools—reflected the excitement about electricity’s potential medical applications that was widespread in early nineteenth-century medicine.