How Did Napoleon Die?

Eben though the post-mortem showed stomach cancer, rumours spread that the exiled French emperor had not died of natural causes. The controversy still goes on, though in a different form.

Following his defeaat at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (born 1769) was sent into exile on the tiny island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. Napoleon spent five years on the British-ruled island before he died on May 5, 1821. During his exile, the former emperor's health declined steadily.

Since September 1819, Bonaparte had been under the care of Dr Antommarchi - a fellow Corsican. The doctor had performed a post-mortem, observed by five British doctors. He confirmed that the emperor had died of stomach cancer. But many people did not believe the official post-mortem, and, until just a few years ago, the rumour prevailed that the emperor had been poisoned with arsenic.

Unexplained inconsistencies

Bonaparte was first treated on St Helena by an Irishman named Dr O;Meara. In a report written at the end of 1817, he stated that the patient's gums were full of holes, and that he suffered from insomnia, swollen legs, attacks of migraine and hot flushes. In O'Meara's view, Napoleon suffered from a mild case of scurvy caused by a poorly balanced diet.

However, a modern French scientist, Rene Maury, saw in this description all the symptoms of arsenic poisoning, which was still unknown at the beginning of the 19th century. Specialists in forensic medicine dismissed Maury's hypothesis as nonsense, and referred to the watertight post-mortem report.

Maury put forward a second argument, though, which pointed aout that when the body of the dead ruler was returned to France in 1840, the corpse inside the coffin had not decomposed. According to Maury, Bonaparte's body had been preserved by the arsenic that was used to kill him! The problem with this theory was that the damp climatic conditions on St Helena could also have slowed down the process of decay. Also, the emperor's coffin was placed in a nest of three progressively larger coffins, which formed an air-tight barrier.

A more valid question was the identity of the murderer or murderers. Possible suspects included an agent of the Bourbons, the French royal family, who were restored to the throne in 1814 and owed their position to Napoleon's defeat. Another hypothesis pointed to a group of British doctors who would certainly have been in a position to get rid of the emperor. Maury, however, claimed to have discovered the real suspect in the Count de Montholon, who was responsible for the household of the exiled emperor. One of his tasks was to order wine from South Africa; De Montholon could quite easily have put poison into the wine. According to the emperor's will, the count stood to receive a large sum of money, so this could have been a motive for him to kill Napoleon.

In the early 1960s, tests were carried out in Canada on samples of Napoleon's hair. The results shot down the arsenic theory. A second round of testing in 1994 revealed traces of arsenic, but in small quantities. The poison could have some from food or the water on St Helena.

Today, historians are concerned with how to evaluate the cause of death. Apart from cancer, Antommarchi also dianosed an enlargement and inflammation of the liver, as well as signs of tubersulosis in the lungs. Some French authors asserted that the conditions on the island were undealthy, and even that the British had tried to hasten the emperor's death by sending him to this damp and inhospitable island. The British, on the other hand, stated that the report of Napoleon's personal physician had been manipulated at a later stage. They pointed to the fact that cancer of the stomach was common in Napoleon's family, and that his death could not be linked to the unhygienic conditions on the island.

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