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Since Schur published his article (Schur, 1966) about additional day residues to Freud's dream of Irma's injection (Freud, 1900, p. 107), interest in determining Irma's identity has grown. Although Schur did not clearly state that the person whom Freud called Irma was in reality Emma Eckstein (1865-1924), one of his patients, most readers understood him that way. They felt that Schur came to this conclusion after perusing certain of Freud's letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess (1858-1928) which had not been included in their published correspondence (Freud, 1950) but had been put at Schur's disposal when he planned his book, on Freud Living and Dying (Schur, 1972).
I can be brief in summarizing what came to light. Fliess, a famous nose and throat specialist in Berlin, was Freud's confidant and principal correspondent in the middle 1890's. He performed a nasal operation on Emma Eckstein, certain that this intervention would cure some of the patient's symptoms. Since Freud had arranged the patient's consultation with Fliess and had given his consent to the surgery, he carried responsibility for the consequences.
The operation took place in February 1895; it turned out to be a fiasco. Twice a life-threatening hemorrhage occurred postoperatively, one early in March and the other on April 10 (Schur, 1966, pp. 56ff., 63ff.).
Freud had the Irma dream during the night between July 23 and July 24, 1895. Emma Eckstein had fully recovered weeks before. Breuer, the greatest medical authority in Freud's group, had cleared Fliess of guilt. Thus, for all practical purposes the excitement about that terribly upsetting incident should have calmed down at the time of the dream, and yet Schur was certain that Emma Eckstein's surgery had played a leading role in it. He negated the possibility