I recently ran across a reference to a 1972 book, Dr. Max Schur's "Freud: Living and Dying." Schur, who lived from around 1895 to 1970, was Freud's own physician in the 1920s and 30s, when Freud was progressively more handicapped by oral cancer. The book is a complete view of Freud's life, with commentaries on key books from Schur's perspective. There is also a special focus on the late years when Freud suffered from cancer, diagnosed in 1923 and ending with Freud's death in London in 1939.
Schur first met Freud when Schur was a medical student in Vienna in 1915 and attended a two-year series of lectures by Freud, then around 58 (b. 1856).
In June 1923, Freud (then 67) wrote physician colleagues about his first cancer surgery. "There is nothing to say that you yourselves couldn't know or expect. The uncertainty that hovers over a man of 67 has now found its material expression. I don't take it very hard; one will defend oneself for a while with the help of modern medicine and then remember Bernard Shaw's warning: Don't try to live forever, you won't succeed." [p. 358]
Chapter 15 "Adjusting to Pain and Illness" (p. 377ff) is too long to quote in full, but I include a few quotes in part. The oral cancer and multiple surgeries and radiotherapies were difficult both because of the pain itself and also the severe difficulties in basic speaking and swallowing creating by the resected spaces. 1924. "In his daily life, he maintained not only the greatest self-control and dignity, but acquired a serenity which had an impact on everyone. Once again, all this was achieved at a price. Freud was forced to change his way of life in many respects. He could no longer attend meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society...[Letter to Eitingon] "You belong to those who refuse to believe I am no longer the same man...In reality...the right thing to do would be to give up all work and obligations and wait in a quiet corner for the natural end...My way of eating does not permit any onlookers." Freud did not want to be asked about his health...was appreciative if friends did not inquire." 379: "Saturday and Sunday for the first time in my medical career I had to stop work over the weekend."
In 1939 he was resettled in London. "During August everything went downhill rapidly." His dog would not approach him, due to odor from decaying oral cancer; "Freud knew what this meant and looked at his pet chow with a tragic and knowing sadness."
On page 527, a famous quote. Asked by Schur, do you believe this will be the last war?, Freud replied dryly, "My last war."
528, Freud reads a short story by Balac, "La Peau de Chagrin," in which the protagonist dies. In Freud's last weeks, Schur recalls a letter about his father written by Freud in 1896: "He is steadily shrinking towards...a fateful date."
On page 529, Freud dies. Schur facilitated this with morphine at the end. Schur closes his book with a quote from Freud in Freud's essay, "Thoughts on Times of War and Death": "Towards the actual person who has died we adopt a special attitude, something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task."
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Regarding his lifelong nicotine addiction, he wrote his doctor in 1893, "I am not obeying your smoking prohibitions; do you really consider it such a great boon to live a great many years in misery?"
Freud was prone to "cardiac attacks" and arrhythmias which may have been related to excessive nicotine or panic attacks about mortality (p. 40; other locations).
