Dr. Eugen Grabscheid, the “singers’ doctor” in New York for 40 years, has been gone for over 25 years. And, yet, not a week goes by that one of my patients doesn’t mention his name, always with a smile, recounting a personal anecdote about this eccentric and unique physician. I first met Dr. Grabscheid around 1984, in the early years of my own practice. He had a lasting influence on me—in how I treat patients and, specifically, how I manage singers. I knew him for the last several years of his life and wanted to share some personal memories of this remarkable doctor. Let’s begin with his early life and education.
Eugen Grabscheid was born on September 1, 1904. Although his obituary in the New York Times said that he was born in Austria, he told me that he actually came there, as a young child, from Galicia. This was an area of Europe known as the Pale, originally a part of Imperial Russia where Jews were allowed to settle. Even in this area, Jews were excluded from some cities and often harassed. Grabscheid told me that one of his earliest childhood memories was running across a field with his family, chased by Cossacks.
When he was a young child, Eugen and his family—his brother Michael and his parents—moved to Austria and settled in Baden bei Wien. He attended school and grew up in this small spa town, about 26 kilometers south of Vienna. I know nothing about his early student years, except that he was a good athlete. He was an avid soccer player and eventually became certified as a soccer referee. This skill was to come in handy later.
Around 1920, Grabscheid was accepted as a student at the School of Medicine at the University of Vienna. He graduated as a doctor in 1928. The Vienna medical school was arguably the best medical school in Europe at the time. It had an enrollment of more than 1,000 students, and over half came from other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A medical degree from Vienna was considered a guarantee of the highest level of medical education and a passport to success, whether you practiced in Bratislava, Ljubljana, or Trieste.
After World War I, the political climate in Vienna starting to turn toward nationalism, and there was a gradual but increasingly menacing trend that discriminated against Jews. By the time Grabscheid was a medical student, discrimination was the norm, rather than the exception. In order to succeed, Grabscheid had to be inventive. He told me the following story.
The pathology professor at the university was a known Nazi sympathizer, and Grabscheid had to get through his pathology exams somehow. He gradually befriended the professor’s assistant, who was in charge of preparing the specimens for the examination. This young man was studying himself—to be a soccer referee. He and Grabscheid made an arrangement: Grabscheid would tutor him for his soccer referee examination and he, in turn, would teach Grabscheid the specimens that would be used for the examination.
The day of the examination arrived. This was an oral examination, with the following format. Three students walked into the examination room and sat side by side on their chairs in front of the podium where the professor would sit and fire questions at them. He would ask one student a question. After the student gave his answer, right or wrong, he would repeat the question for the next student. The questions kept coming, addressed to each student in turn. After an hour, the professor would write down a grade for each student. Obviously, there was no way to control what the professor would write down, and he could pass or fail students at his discretion.
So the examination began, with the students sitting on their chairs in front of the podium. The professor, wearing a military uniform, entered, sat down, and started firing questions. But young Eugen, coached by the professor’s assistant, was prepared. He told me that the last question, in forensic pathology, was this: “If a man drowns in salt water, will his excised lungs sink or float in fresh water?” Grabscheid knew the answer to this1 and every other question as well. Despite all odds, he passed his pathology exam with flying colors.
After medical school, Grabscheid was accepted into otolaryngology. The Allgemeine Poliklinik in Vienna was probably the best such institution in the world. It was founded by Ádám Politzer and Josef Gruber and had a pre-eminent reputation, especially in otology. Laryngology also began in Vienna, with Turck and Czermak, little more than one generation earlier. These were the first physicians to make use of Manuel Garcia’s laryngeal mirror concept to look at the larynx. Theodor Billroth performed the world’s first laryngectomy in 1874, only 50 years before. All of this knowledge and scientific advancement came together in the clinic where Grabscheid was a resident.
The Poliklinik was a busy place. This was a time before antibiotics, and life-threatening bacterial infections of the head and neck were common. Although Fleming discovered penicillin in 1929, it was not commercially made in any quantity until the 1940s. When it first became available, it was a miracle drug, rare and difficult to obtain and more valuable than gold. The classic film The Third Man with Orson Wells, based on the underworld market in counterfeit penicillin in Vienna, will give you a sense of perspective about the life-and-death importance of this drug.
But not all the work at the Wiener Allgemeine Poliklinik focused on otology. Laryngology in those days was mostly office based and consisted of managing laryngeal obstruction from syphilitic gumma or tuberculous vegetations. The doctor would visualize the larynx with a mirror and then apply medications like ferric chloride to the larynx using a long, angled, fine camel-hair brush to cauterize and try to shrink the lesions. This was definitely not phonosurgery, but simply repeated and often frustrating attempts to keep the patient from suffocating from an airway obstruction. I actually found one of these brushes, dusty and discarded, in Dr. Grabscheid’s office in the 1980s. He must have thrown it into his suitcase when he left Vienna.
Dr. Grabscheid told me the following personal recollection about Dr. Gustav Alexander, who was chief of otology at the Poliklinik.
A common cosmetic problem back then was management of a collapsed nasal dorsum from syphilis, in those days an incurable disease. The treatment consisted of injecting liquid paraffin subcutaneously along the top of the nose to elevate the bridge. Alexander had such a patient, a syphilitic with a collapsed nose. This particular patient experienced a complication from the procedure—the nose became inflamed, and the paraffin melted and started to extrude. The man, insane with neurosyphilis, got a gun and came to the clinic. Dr. Grabscheid described the patient running down the hallway yelling, paraffin dripping from his nose, looking for Alexander with the gun firing randomly until the guards stopped the rampage.
Apparently this patient, Johann Sokoup, eventually managed to kill Alexander in 1932, shooting him on the street while Alexander was on his way to work.
Another story concerns Dr. Grabscheid’s encounters with Sigmund Freud. Freud had developed a cancer of the upper jaw, most likely from smoking. He underwent a variety of treatments, including radiation, but had developed obstruction of the Eustachian tube with hearing loss.
The Poliklinik at the time had a practice of sending the junior attending surgeon out to make house calls. This was Dr. Grabscheid’s job. He would go to Freud’s home in the outskirts of Vienna, clutching his Eustachian tube catheter, and insufflate Freud’s ears.
He treated Freud on multiple occasions and he described to me Freud’s home, with the Egyptian statues on his desk. He apparently also got to know many of the other psychiatrists in Freud’s circle. When I asked him what he thought of Freud, he growled (with his thick Viennese accent): “Ach! I preferred Breuer!” Josef Breuer was of course one of Freud’s disciples, remembered for his pioneering studies on hysteria.
Time passed, and the political climate in Vienna grew increasingly menacing for Jews, even for physicians. Curfew was imposed: Jews were not allowed on the streets after dark. Unfortunately, there was, in this pre-antibiotic era, also an epidemic of acute streptococcal mastoiditis. This was a fulminating and frequently fatal disease, common in young children that needed lifesaving decompression surgery. Dr. Grabscheid was one of the doctors who had to make house calls on these patients, often at night. He would walk on the streets with his doctor’s bag—containing a syringe of local anesthetic, a mallet, chisel, and curettes—and visit these sick patients, usually children, to open their mastoids, often “on the kitchen table.” To do this, he was issued a special written permit from the authorities that allowed him out at night, despite being a Jew. He showed this document to me, complete with official swastika stamp, in 1985. He kept it for all of his life.
On March 12, 1938, Hitler formally annexed Austria. Kristallnacht soon followed, on November 9. Before the year’s end, Dr. Grabscheid left Vienna and immigrated to America. A large contingent of Austria’s finest doctors in all specialties came to the U.S. Among them was Dr. Eric Kandel, psychiatrist and Nobel laureate neuroscientist at Columbia University.
Since Grabscheid was able to bring many of his instruments and treatment machines with him, I assume his departure was somewhat elective—he may have had relatives in the U.S. helping him. But he left his family behind. The Nazis killed his mother. His brother Michael wound up in Mauthausen, an infamous concentration camp in Upper Austria, about 20 km east of Linz. After Grabscheid arrived in New York, he was able to somehow secure his brother’s release, and Michael eventually escaped to Shanghai. He was already crippled by then and never regained his health. When, many years later, I once asked Grabscheid why he never had any children, he said, “After what I have seen, why would I want to bring any children into this world?”
When Grabscheid arrived in New York, he was a young and active otolaryngologist, trained at one of the finest clinics in the world, and looking for work. Unfortunately, it was difficult to get a hospital position. There was large influx of Jewish refugee doctors, and the local medical community did not uniformly welcome them. Even Mount Sinai Hospital was not receptive to Jewish doctors from Eastern Europe, even Austria.
Dr. Grabscheid eventually obtained privileges at the Harlem Eye and Ear Hospital, where he later became chief of otolaryngology. He held this position for 26 years, until the hospital closed in 1968. When the hospital closed, Grabscheid, aged 65, stopped doing surgery and began his office practice, focusing on singers. But his surgical practice included all aspects of otolaryngology.
Many years later, I took care of some of his old patients. He did a beautiful thyroidectomy, just as well as a mastoidectomy.
On February 3, 1971, Dr. Grabscheid was on call when an emergency case was brought to the hospital. A policeman got shot in a drug bust, resulting in a serious injury to the neck. This was Frank Serpico, the undercover cop who later became the subject of a classic movie starring Al Pacino. It was Dr. Grabscheid who operated on Serpico and saved his life. This may have been the beginning of his lifelong special relationship with the NYPD. He was appointed honorary police surgeon—and to the end of his life he would proudly display his shield to anyone who was interested.
Read more about Dr. Grabscheid in an upcoming issue of CS.
