Just before his 67th birthday, a bearded, scholarly-looking man suffering from leukoplakia appeared at the clinic of Vienna Rhinologist Marcus Hajek. The patient had a group of hard, smooth white spots on the inside of the jaw; expecting a trivial operation, he had not mentioned the visit to his family. But the operation went badly—the growth proved cancerous. In response to an alarming phone call, the patient's wife and daughter rushed to the clinic, found him seated on a kitchen chair with blood all over his clothes. He was too ill to go home.
There was no free room or even bed at the clinic, but a bed was improvised in a room already occupied by a cretinous dwarf. While his family was out at lunch, the patient suffered a hemorrhage. He could not call out, but the friendly dwarf noticed his condition and rushed for help. After desperate efforts, the bleeding was stanched. Thus, writes Britain's Dr. Ernest Jones, a hitherto unhonored and still unnamed dwarf probably saved the life of Sigmund Freud.
Medical History. Much of the third and final volume of Analyst Jones's painstakingly researched, lovingly written biography* is taken up with an extraordinary account of Freud's illness and its effects on his last years. The effects, never before described in such detail, were painful, profound and sometimes bizarre.
After the first operation, daughter Anna broke hospital rules and spent the night at her father's bedside, thus beginning a 16-year vigil during which, often for months at a time, she was always within call. Freud himself was not told that examination of the removed tissues revealed cancer, although more surgery was soon necessary for "an unmistakably malignant ulcer in the hard palate which invaded ... the upper part of the lower jaw and even the cheek." First, a carotid artery was tied off, and glands beneath the upper jawbone (some of them already suspiciously enlarged) were removed. In the second stage of the operation, after slitting the lip and cheek wide open, the surgeon removed the whole upper jaw and palate on the right side, which threw the nasal cavity and mouth into one. "These frightful operations were performed under local anesthesia."
To shut off the mouth from the nasal cavity and make speech and eating possible, Freud had to wear a "huge prosthesis, a sort of magnified denture or obturator.'' This instrument, says Jones, was a horror that Freud and family nicknamed "the monster." It was painful and difficult to get in or out. In one nightmare scene, neither Freud nor the hovering Anna nor a physician could get it into his mouth, and the surgeon who devised the monster had to be called. When it fitted tightly enough to fulfill its purpose, it caused recurring sores. When it was comfortably loose, Freud sat with his thumb to his face, holding the monster in place.