Medicine: The Last Days of Freud

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...