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"The Riddle of the Sphincter" ... Did an enema kill Napoleon?
THE enduring mystery surrounding the demise of Napoleon Bonaparte has just been given another twist. The official verdict, supported by an autopsy, was that l'Empereur died of stomach cancer on May 5, 1821, at the age of 51, while in exile on Britain's South Atlantic island colony of St. Helena. But French conspiracy theorists suspect that Napoleon was slowly poisoned, either by the British - true to their perfidious nature - or by his confidant, Count Charles de Montholon, who was supposedly in the pay of French royalists opposed to the emperor's return to France.After all I've seen of late, I'd put money on the French guy. The scientific evidence for this is a chemical analysis conducted in 2001 on a lock of hair cut from Napoleon's hair after his death that found huge traces of arsenic. But, according to next Saturday's issue of the British weekly New Scientist, all are wrong. "Medical misadventure" by Napoleon's over-enthusiastic doctors was to blame, according to forensic pathologist Steven Karch at the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Department. Every day, the doctors gave Napoleon an enema to relieve his symptoms of a sick stomach and intestinal cramping. "They used really big, nasty syringe-shaped things," Karch says lyrically. Still in use among the French, I hope. This, combined with regular doses of a chemical called antimony potassium tartrate to induce vomiting, would have left poor Boney perilously short of potassium. This can lead to a lethal heart condition known in English as in French as "torsades de pointes" in which the blood flow to the brain is disrupted by bursts of irregular heartbeats. Karch's theory is that any arsenic in Napoleon's body that may have come from smoke or other environmental sources would have made him more vulnerable to torsades. But that on its own would not have sent him to meet his maker. Posted by: Zenster 2004-07-25 |
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