Abstract
Michael Petch has been assiduous in criticising the medical conclusions of my book Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century since its publication in February 2013. I understand his concern, since he was the junior cardiologist assigned Britten’s case by consultant Graham Hayward, yet the arguments put forward in his article 1 in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (5 September 2014) are no more convincing than previous ones. Partly, this is because he is working from the first printing of the book, which I sent him prior to publication, rather than the third printing and subsequent paperback edition which benefited from the release of Britten’s medical records, hitherto considered lost or unavailable, just as the book was being published.
In the third printing and paperback edition, I corrected one error, which Petch quotes in his article, that in theatre it became evident to Donald Ross, the surgeon who operated Britten on 7 May 1973, that Britten’s aortic valve and root were ‘riddled with syphilis’. On the contrary, as cardiologist Hywel Davies wrote in his thoughtful article in the New Statesman (7 June 2013) in response to the controversy, Ross had no idea during surgery of the cause of Britten’s deteriorated heart valve. ‘The aetiology of this valve lesion is not clear to me’, he recorded in his surgical notes (which formed part of the released medical records). As Petch states, Ross wrote in his notes that the appearance of the aortic valve was ‘totally non-specific’, which meant that while in surgery Ross did not think syphilis the cause. Though Petch writes that ‘syphilis was very much in the minds of Tait, Hayward and myself before the operation and we found no evidence’ (and leaving to one side the issue of potential false negatives), this is not what I took away from our several communications on the subject while I was researching the book.
The medical notes in fact show that Ross in surgery did order multiple biopsies and we know he received the results. We also know that over time he shared the results with at least three medical colleagues: Davies; a second colleague who has confirmed the information to me but who does not wish to be named; and a third colleague, a senior member of the surgical team, who also does not wish to be named but who has declined to deny the information, and whom Petch has conspicuously been unable to cite in his support. In my conversations with Davies between 2008 and 2012, he moved from refusing to comment on what Ross had told him to acknowledging that syphilis was indeed Ross’s final diagnosis. The third of Ross’s confidants shared Ross’s judgement in the 1980s with a senior medical colleague who also confirmed this diagnosis with me at the time of publication. Finally, when I was working on the revisions to the book, I asked Ross’s wife, a former theatre nurse, what changes she thought I should make. She asked me to remove one sentence, in which Davies speculated that her husband’s reason for telling him was that the diagnosis might then become publicly known, without his (Ross’s) evident involvement. She rightly said of her distinguished husband that if he had wanted information of this kind to go beyond a handful of colleagues, as Lord Moran did with Winston Churchill, he was more than capable of making this happen; and of course that he did not want or expect the biopsy results published.
Finally, Petch’s assertion that Britten consulted six doctors at the time of his illness in America in 1940 should be qualified. Britten’s medical care was predominantly in the hands of friends – a psychiatrist, his wife and their daughter – with whom Britten and his lover Peter Pears were lodging. For all their evident attentions, they thought Britten was suffering from a form of scarlet fever, later streptococcus and treated him accordingly; they were neither qualified nor inclined to view syphilis as a potential cause of his illness, which in retrospect was showing every indication of the disease in its secondary phase.
I wish there had been a different outcome, and like Petch I am saddened by the music Britten never wrote. But I worked hard and carefully to uncover the cause of Britten’s deterioration and ultimately found the witnesses and evidence that led me to my conclusions more plausible than the assertions that have subsequently appeared to try to counter them. I believe that those who are prepared to follow the detailed evidence and objective witnesses will do so also.