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Sat 24 Jul, 2004 06:54 am
Napoleon Bonaparte was not murdered, but was killed by his overenthusiastic doctors, according to a study of records from the emperor's final weeks.
Controversy over Napoleon's death in exile on the island of St Helena has been raging for more than half a century. Most historians accept the official version: that he died from stomach cancer.
This was the verdict of an autopsy by his personal physician, Francesco Antommarchi, which was observed by five English doctors. What is more, Napoleon's father had died of the same disease.
The most colourful version of events is that the emperor was murdered by his confidant Count Charles de Montholon. The army officer was supposedly in the pay of French royalists worried that Napoleon would return to France. Montholon could have poisoned the emperor by putting arsenic in his wine - an idea that was bolstered by the discovery of arsenic in locks of Napoleon's hair collected after his death.
Now forensic pathologist Steven Karch at the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Department and his team have come up with the idea that it was medical misadventure that finished Napoleon off.
Rapid heartbeats
Every day the doctors gave Napoleon an enema to relieve his symptoms. "They used really big, nasty syringe-shaped things," Karch says. This, combined with regular doses of antimony potassium tartrate to make him vomit, would have left his body seriously short of potassium, which can lead to a lethal heart condition called "torsades de pointes" in which bouts of rapid heartbeats disrupt blood flow to the brain.
Any arsenic in Napoleon's body, which may have come from coal smoke and other sources in the environment, would also have predisposed him to torsades, but on its own is unlikely to have pushed him over the edge, Karch says.
The final straw was probably 600 milligrams of mercuric chloride given as a purge. This was five times the normal dose, and would have depleted his potassium levels further. Napoleon died two days later.
None of this convinces Phil Corso, a retired doctor from Connecticut who is a strong proponent of the cancer theory. "It is really far-fetched when you think about it," he says. Napoleon had clearly been ill for a long time and his doctors are unlikely to have made much of a difference, Corso says.
newscientist website
Hair analysis clears Napoleon's 'poisoners'
18:20 29 October 02
NewScientist.com news service
High levels of arsenic found in Napoleon's hair were not the result of deliberate poisoning, a new forensic study has concluded. The metal most probably came from a hair ointment, or perhaps gunpowder or wallpaper paste, say the researchers.
Napoleon died in 1821 on the island of Saint Helena, where he was imprisoned after losing in battle to the British at Waterloo. A post-mortem suggested at the time that he died of complications caused by a gastric ulcer.
But in June 2001 a more controversial theory that Napoleon was slowly poisoned to death was apparently confirmed by a forensic study of his hair. Pascal Kintz of the Strasbourg Forensic Institute in France studied hairs taken from the former emperor's head after he died and found levels of arsenic seven to 38 times higher than normal. Kintz concluded this must be the result of poisoning.
Now an investigation carried out by another team of French forensic experts suggests that Napoleon died in less sinister circumstances. The new study, commissioned by the magazine Science et Vie, focuses on strands of hair taken from Napoleon in 1805, 1814 and 1821. All were found to have abnormally high levels of arsenic and the researchers conclude that poisoning could not have been the cause of death.
"If arsenic caused Napoleon's death, he would have died three times over," says Ivan Ricordel, head of the toxicology at Paris Police headquarters, who led the investigation.
Gunpowder and glue
The researchers used X-ray synchrotron radiation to analyse the hair samples for tiny trace elements. On average, human hair contains arsenic at 0.8 parts per million. The samples taken from Napoleon were all found to contain massive doses of ranging between 15 and 100 parts per million.
The researchers also studied the way hair retains arsenic in the laboratory tests and found it relatively easy to contaminate. Historical records revealed possible sources of the contamination, including gunpowder, rat poison, wallpaper glue and most pertinently, hair ointment. Also, arsenic compounds were used to preserve Napoleon's artefacts after his death.
The theory that Napoleon was poisoned first surfaced after diaries belonging to Napoleon's valet, Louis Marchand, were published in 1955. These described Napoleon suffering from many symptoms associated with arsenic poisoning. Some suggested that the British or a French conspirator had poisoned the former emperor and covered up his murder.
The latest study is unlikely to put an end to the matter. Some conspiracy theorists believe that Napoleon's body might have been swapped prior to burial and recently made an unsuccessful bid to have it exhumed for DNA testing.
i love these age old discoveries of the past. Is there any dna leftin a mummy?
yeah man theres plenty of dna left in mummies
they even got dna from a ten thousand or fifteen thousand year old mammoth they found in a block of ice somewhere
says here in the article above they even got dna from a dinosaur bone
so jurrasic park here we come
i heard scirentists got Napoleon's DNA from his hair that collected by his freinds' posterity
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