What killed Albert Einstein? A ruptured aortic aneurysm

Albert Einstein died at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey in the early hours of 18 April 1955, aged 76, after an abdominal aortic aneurysm, a ballooning weak spot in the body’s largest artery, ruptured and he declined an operation that might have saved him.

The aneurysm had been found years earlier. In the autumn of 1948, after long bouts of abdominal pain, Einstein consulted the surgeon Rudolph Nissen at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, whose exploratory operation revealed it. Nissen wrapped the bulge in cellophane, then a leading treatment: the foreign material provokes scarring that narrows and reinforces the artery. Einstein left hospital three weeks later and gained several years of symptom-free work.

By mid-April 1955 the wrap was no longer enough. In severe pain, he was taken to Princeton Hospital and refused further surgery:

“I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially; I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

In the early morning of 18 April, the nurse on duty heard him say a few words in German, which she could not understand. His last words are therefore unknown.

Syphilis or smoking?

A persistent claim, from his friend and physician Janos Plesch, is that syphilis caused the aneurysm. The evidence is thin: no sign of the disease was ever reported in his body, and only around 1% of untreated late vascular syphilis produces this kind of aneurysm. A likelier culprit is his pipe. In an analysis of more than three million people, 80% of those who developed such aneurysms were smokers, and Einstein smoked heavily for decades, at times picking up cigarette butts from the street when his doctors banned tobacco.

Even death did not end the medical story. A pathologist removed Einstein’s brain without his family’s permission, preserved it in formaldehyde, kept it for decades and parcelled out sections to researchers.