Under what circumstances the death of Vuk Karadžić occurred is still not entirely known today, but the only certainty is that he felt absolutely no symptoms.
How Vuk Karadžić died remains unclear to many even today, and it is interesting that he did not feel any symptoms at all.
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić was a writer, philologist, and reformer of the Serbian alphabet and orthography. He was born on November 7, 1787, in the village of Tršić, near Loznica. He died on February 7, 1864, in Vienna. Vuk is one of the most significant figures of Serbian culture and literature of the first half of the 19th century.
Little is known about his death, and according to some sources, he died of meningitis, that is, inflammation of the brain.
When Dr. Eugen Braun, the personal physician of the family of Vuk S. Karadžić, confirmed the cessation of all bodily functions—namely, the death of Vuk S. Karadžić—it was almost midnight.
Dr. Eugen Braun bowed deeply and expressed his condolences to Vuk’s wife, Ana Kraus. This happened several hours after the death of the ill Vuk, whose body lay cooled and somewhat stiffened for several hours in a French-style bed called a “loarje.” Vuk was wearing gray-striped trousers, a white shirt made of Prague woolen cloth, and over it an old-fashioned vest of traditional folk costume, also made of woolen cloth, writes portalibris.rs.
Vuk S. Karadžić died exactly at 11:30 p.m. on February 7, 1864. As a man of advanced age, Vuk carried many illnesses within him, but today it is reliably claimed that he died of meningitis, or inflammation of the brain.
However, Vuk (according to later recollections of his wife Ana Kraus and daughter Mina) had not a single symptom of this disease: he had no headaches, no neck pain, no dizziness, nor did he lose consciousness during the last seven months of his illness.
The only illness he had was his “withered left leg,” as Vuk often referred to the paralysis of his left lower leg, which he suffered as a result of an injury when he fell from a horse in 1816, but this did not trouble him during his illness.
Doubts about the accuracy of Dr. Eugen Braun’s diagnosis were further fueled by the later recollection of Mina, Vuk’s daughter, that Eugen Braun was “strangely and constantly” staring at the left leg of the deceased Vuk on the bed.
As Mina remembered, “Dr. Braun kept looking continuously at the left, previously ill, leg of the dead Vuk,” then, according to her recollection, “he lifted and rolled up the trouser leg, felt the bone,” and “measured the warmth of the skin” of Vuk’s left lower leg with “some strange device,” which Mina could not explain, but which, according to her testimony, can today certainly be considered a kind of early thermometer.
Vuk’s wife Ana later confirmed, several years after Vuk’s death, the words of her daughter Mina, adding a few details she recalled amid the great crowd and confusion during the days of Vuk’s death and funeral, among them this: “Even after two days of lying on the bier, Vuk’s left diseased leg, though stiff and deathly cold, appeared flexible, bluish, and well supplied with blood.
It gave the impression of warmth and very strong circulation, despite the fact that Vuk had already been deathly gray and lifeless for two days.”
Vuk’s son Dimitrije later recalled that in 1897, when Vuk’s remains were transferred from Vienna to Belgrade and buried in the churchyard of the Cathedral Church, he was “astonished at how light Vuk’s coffin was, as if it were empty.”
The other three gravediggers who, together with Vuk’s son Dimitrije, transferred Vuk’s coffin from Vienna to Belgrade stated the same; the Austrian authorities, as well as the Serbian ones, at the request of Vuk’s son Dimitrije, did not allow the coffin to be opened or Vuk’s remains to be transferred into a new, metal coffin.
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Source: Luftika; Foto: Wikimedia Creative Commons