Dr. Eugen Grabscheid was a good clinician—an experienced and instinctive diagnostician. While later in his life he didn’t treat everything, he knew everything, knew when to medicate, and when to refer. But his real mastery lay in the psychology of patient care. He understood people—how could he not, given what he had been through? There was tremendous reassurance in just seeing this old man, with his gruff authoritarian demeanor, and hearing that crackling, throat-clearing Viennese accent. He truly understood patients, especially singers, and they flocked to him.
And, yet, he was no “society doctor.” Yes, he treated Marilyn Monroe (and also Arthur Miller, during the time they were getting divorced). But he also treated ordinary people from just down the street—and treated them equally. I remember one patient, an old man who came every Saturday morning like clockwork for some trivial complaint. The man would show up, clutching his wrinkled copy of the New York Times, carefully refolded, which he would ceremonially hand to Grabscheid. It was an unspoken agreement, part of the visit, that he delivered the Times to the office. Grabscheid called it the “obolus,” a reference to an old Roman coin that was used by Romans to pay their taxes. It was an inside joke that went on for years.
Much has been said about Grabscheid’s eccentricities. He was parsimonious to a fault. To save money, he would cut each 4×4 gauze square in half with scissors before he used it. He never ate lunch but had hidden caches of candy and half-eaten chocolate bars around the office—and he would surreptitiously snatch a bite as he walked from room to room.
But he was also tremendously generous. The great American bass-baritone Simon Estes told me that when he came to Grabscheid as a young African-American student from Iowa, Grabscheid never charged him. “You can pay me when you’re famous,” he would growl. And Estes did become famous—one of the greatest singers in the world. He never forgot that gesture and would call Grabscheid for advice even from Bayreuth, where he broke the mold singing The Flying Dutchman. He was the first black singer to appear in this cultural temple to the music of Richard Wagner, formerly a notorious den of Nazi sympathizers.
Above all, Dr. Grabscheid loved his patients.
But these were doctors from another era. The other “voice doctor” of the time, Dr. Leo P. Reckford, not only treated singers but also knew his music. Years later, Jerome Hines told me that Reckford had a grand piano in his examination room and would play with his patients to get them to demonstrate where their vocal difficulties lay. Dr. Friedrich Brodnitz, an Emil Froeschels-trained phoniatrist from Berlin, exemplified all that was cultured and elegant. He once advised me that in order to treat singers, one must be familiar with all the operatic roles.
Grabscheid’s practice, at the corner of E 96th Street and Madison, was unique. In 1984, when I first met Dr. Grabscheid at his office, I imagined that I was stepping into the Vienna Poliklinik of the 1930s: head mirrors with magnifying lenses, spirit lamps, syringes filled with medications of every description, vitamins, iron, liver extract, and huge bottles of pills that he would dole out, one by one, into the patient’s hand. And like that camel-hair laryngeal brush, the office was full of old machines . . . machines that hummed and buzzed, machines that nebulized, heat lamps, moist heating pads for the chest. One machine had a pair of calipers, the tips covered with saline-soaked gauze pads. These would be placed on either side of the neck and would either vibrate or transmit a low-voltage electric current while the patient was asked to slowly count. His office was like a museum, or better—a time warp into another world.
Grabscheid was tremendously busy and would frequently see about 80–100 patients a day. How was this possible? First, there were no scheduled appointments. The office opened before 8 a.m., and patients would show up, unscheduled, and sign in. Then, it was first come, first served. The waiting room was always full, like a clinic—world-famous singers sitting, cheek to jowl, beside local patients from the Upper East Side or his old patients from Harlem.
The office was dark. This was not, as some patients joked, because he was too miserly to buy brighter light bulbs. Rather, it harkened back to the days when examination rooms had to be dark to maximize the effect of illumination from a petroleum lamp, which was reflected by the head mirror into the deep crevasses of the head and neck. I believe this is where Grabscheid came from—a time that we, in our white-walled clinics ablaze with halogen and xenon lights, never knew and may find difficult to understand.
His patient evaluation began with a brief history. He kept his notes on 5×7 file cards. No matter how many years the patient had been coming, how complicated the history, it all fit on that one little card, a word or two just to remind him of the facts. Next came the examination: the smudged laryngeal mirror, heated over a spirit lamp, wiped against the sleeve of his old, frayed, yellow cardigan . . . and then, “Say ‘Ahhh!’”
Now came the accusation, quickly followed by the promise. “You have been eating Chinese food again!” he would thunder. Then, with the patient guiltily nodding and cowering, “But I will make you better!” would follow.
Many of Grabscheid’s medications seemed esoteric: ananase, tincture of rhatania, injections of iron and liver extract. An arcane pharmacopeia from Vienna of the 1920s, that is now just as surely gone as is the good doctor.
Every patient received not only an evaluation, but also a treatment. A handful of pills, inhalation, injection, physical therapy—the office looked like an opium den, dark, reeking of menthol and eucalyptus, clouds of vapors swirling in the twilight, supine bodies scattered on every available flat surface. So, while face-to-face time might be only a few minutes, patients would actually spend a much longer time in the office. And most people left feeling better than when they arrived.
When Dr. Grabscheid died, his staff gave me one of his old machines. One week later, the machine also stopped working. This, I think, is the way it was meant to be.
And I fiercely believe that men like this should not be forgotten.
