Einstein A Biography

PROLOGUE THE IMMORTAL EINSTEIN'S SECRET Princeton, New Jersey, April 18, 1955. A sunny Monday morning. Pathologist Thomas Harvey's shift begins at the hospital in this university town. The dissection table in the autopsy room holds a dead man whose presence offers Harvey the opportunity of a lifetime. The forty-two-year-old starts in as he would on any other workday, picking up a hospital form and entering the requisite data in the spaces provided. Name: Albert . . . Family Name: Einstein . . . Gender: Male . . . Age: 76 . . . Year: 55 . . . Postmortem Serial Number for the Year 1955: 33. Then the medical examiner begins the autopsy. He places his scalpel behind one of the dead man's ears and pulls it hard over the neck and thorax through the cold, pale skin down to the abdomen. Then he repeats this cut beginning with the other ear. The result is the Y incision that Rudolf Virchow, a Berlin doctor, had introduced to pathology 150 years earlier. Blood trickles out of the abdominal cavity. Harvey suspects that a ruptured aorta is the cause of death. It soon becomes apparent that his hypothesis is correct. Einstein had been suffering from an aneurysm for years, a blood-filled protrusion of his abdominal artery, and it had burst during the night, evidently owing to a weakness in the vascular wall. The inevitable result was internal bleeding and death. The doctor announces these findings to the journalists eagerly assembled in front of the clinic to report every detail to the world. The pathologist has run into the physicist now lying on the autopsy table several times in the past, which is nothing out of the ordinary in a small town like Princeton, where Einstein spent the final twenty-two years of his life. The only time the doctor came into direct contact with his prominent fellow Princetonian, however, was during a house call, when he was standing in for a female colleague. "I see you've switched genders," Einstein quipped when the doctor entered his room for that visit. Evidently he preferred the female variety of medical care. He was lying in his bed, which took up nearly half of his room. A feather quilt covered his stocky body, and his famous shock of hair was spread out on the pillow. The patient was again suffering from an upset stomach, as he had off and on since his childhood. Harvey asked him to hold out one of his arms. He looked for a suitable vein, stuck a needle into the skin, and drew blood into a syringe. While doing so, he told Einstein how he had bicycled through Europe with friends for a few weeks before the war and had seen something of Germany along the way. The emigrant listened attentively. Finally the doctor gave him a glass and asked him for a urine sample. When Einstein returned from the bathroom and handed him the warm container, Harvey kept thinking, This is from the greatest genius of all time. And now Einstein's cold corpse is lying cut open before him. It is Harvey's last chance to take something from the body before it goes to the crematorium. Suddenly the pathologist sees, and seizes, his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Case 55-33 will change his life. Removing and examining the brain of a dead person does not go beyond the purview of standard autopsy procedure. Harvey, however, has been neither asked nor authorized to do what he does next to Einstein's body, nor does the Hippocratic oath endorse his actions. He saws off the head of the dead man and scoops out its contents. He holds the brain in his hand the way Hamlet held Yorick's skull. In theseNeffe, Jürgen is the author of 'Einstein A Biography', published 2007 under ISBN 9780374146641 and ISBN 0374146640.