The Death of Napoleon
By JOHN WILLIAMSON rr HERE has always been some uncertainty I about what Napoleon died of, and an analysis of a lock of his hair carried out re- cently with the aid of an atomic reactor has cleared up the uncertainty to some degree, but left a mystery behind. He was poisoned with arsenic, according to the new evidence published recently in Nature.* He died on St. Helena in 1821 after a long, painful and miserable illness. Francesco Antom- marchi, who had been his household physician for two years, was the only pathologist on the island, and he carried out an autopsy. His opinion was that Napoleon had died of liver disease, but the cause of death, which must have caused a lot of controversy among the doctors, was certified as what would now be called cancer of the stomach. The certificate was signed, not by Antommarchi, but by five British medical officers, none of whom was a pathologist. The science of diagnosis was not very advanced at the time, and probably there was no funny busi- ness about this official verdict, although it was certainly wrong. Since then at least nineteen widely different and contradictory diagnoses have been suggested; and none proved.
Napoleon was already ill during the Hundred Days, as is well enough known. After Waterloo when he was on board HMS Northumberland he improved, and in the early days on St. Helena his health was not bad. Later'on, he became moody and complained of headaches and sundry aches and pains. His legs swelled up and he had alternating bouts of insomnia and somnolence and of diarrhoea and constipation. The attacks of ill-health seemed to be intermittent, becoming acute from time to time. During 1816 his ill- ness increased, and he developed toothache and became jaundiced in the skin and eyes (the symptom of liver illness). He used to sit very often glumly before the fire, with cold feet wrapped in hot towels to help his bad circulation. He was often in pain. Between 1816 and 1821 he had occasional bouts of acute illness of this kind, with intervening periods of improvement. In 1821 he became very ill indeed, and the doc- tors treated him with all the quack remedies of the time, including tartar emetic and corrosive sublimate. These worsened his condition and he died in that year. He was not embalmed, yet when the' body was embalmed in 1840 it was astonishingly well preserved.
On the basis of the reported symptoms and of the treatment given, a diagnosis of arsenic poisoning was suspected recently, and for this reason a couple of milligrams of hair were ob- tained from a specimen kept among his remains and analysed for arsenic, using a micro- technique whereby the sample is irradiated with thermal neutrons, mixed then with a sample of arsenic, and the ratio of radioactive original arsenic to the ordinary added arsenic deter- mined. The value found was extremely high, at least ten times higher than the normal value. Because arsenic is deposited in the tissues in prolonged poisoning cases, this is reasonable confirmatory evidence of chronic arsenic poison- ing. From the other details of the case, it is probable that this was aggravated later by antimony poisoning due to the innocently given tartar emetic and by mercury poisoning due to the corrosive sublimate, which would corrode the stomach and account for its abnormal ap- pearance at autopsy. The diagnosis of chronic arsenic poisoning, with intermittent acute at- tacks, may be wrong, but the evidence in favour of it is impressive.
It is barely possible that although the arsenic concentration in his hair is high, it was a normal value for him. There are often wide normal variations in the level of certain elements in the body. It is possible that the lock of hair has been kept unwittingly in a container in which it has been subsequently contaminated acci- dentally with arsenic (deliberate contamination is too far-fetched an idea). It is possible the chemi- cal analysis was inaccurate. These considerations cannot be ruled out, but they seem unlikely.
The possibilities that remain include murder, suicide and misadventure. The latter is by no means unlikely. There have been cases in the past where arsenic poisoning has occurred, among vintners, for instance, due to the inad- vertent inclusion of arsenic in the diet from some unforeseeable source. This has usually been, in recent years, due to arsenical insecti- cides contaminating fruit, or something of this kind, since arsenic hardly occurs naturally at all in plants or animals. If this was how it happened, it can only have been due to ignor- ance or gross lack of hygiene in the kitchen. Moreover, no one else seems to have been similarly affected. Had it been suicide, one can only conclude that Napoleon had an accomplice who got him the stuff, and also that it was ill short supply, since he was such a long time taking it and caused himself the most prolonged suffering, lasting over five years. Had it been murder, it must have been by someone in rela- tively frequent contact with him over those years of loose imprisonment, probably both on Elba and St. Helena. There is a possibility that it was a sadistic, long-drawn-out poisoning.
One can't come to any conclusion about this, because there are too many loose ends. The new scientific evidence does raise strong suspicions of foul play, however. What would be very in- teresting to a student of Napoleon himself would be the suicide possibility, since the motives involved must have been very disorderly. That Napoleon was murdered seems the strongest likelihood, but the assessment of these probabilities is very subjective. In either case. there seem to be grounds for making a fresh study of the circumstances of Napoleon's two incarcerations.
* S. Forshufyud, H. Smith and A. Wasson. Nature, 1961, VOL 192, p. 103.
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