Since Napoleon's body was plump and round, like a woman's, with
breasts like a woman and small, delicate, feminine hands, some have
speculated that he suffered from hyperpituitarism - excessive activity of
the pituitary gland - which may have accounted for premature 'burn-out'
on the onset of middle age, with excessive tiredness, lethargy, obesity and
even change of personality after I8o8. Others advance the idea of
'hypogonadism' - a condition affecting one in five hundred male births
where, instead of the normal XY (male) and XX (female) chromosome
pattern, an XXY paradigm can occur, where the Y competes with the
XX. The obesity and part of the post-I 8 I 5 illnesses should, on this view,
be separated from the hepatitis that (allegedly) killed him. Then there is
controversy about whether the liver failure was a result of amoebic
dysentery or whether chronic liver failure, antedating St Helena, could
simply have combined with gynaecomastia (womanly breasts), constipa
tion and digestive disorders to produce the valetudinarian Emperor of
Borodino, Dresden and Waterloo.
Other suggestions for Napoleon's maladies and possibly for his death
also include bilharzia, picked up in Egypt in I798-4J9- which would have
accounted for the urinary malfunctions, Frohlich's disease or adiposo
genital dystrophia, caused by the defective functioning of the hypophysis
- the organ of internal secretion - dysentery, scurvy, appendicitis,
epilepsy, malaria, tuberculosis and gastric ulcers. Most of these seem no
more convincing than the official verdict of death by cancer, but they do
account for the obesity at death and they do explain the periodicity of
Napoleon's illnesses, which the cancer theory cannot. However, by fa r
the most convincing explanation for Napoleon's death is arsenical
poisoning. This not only clears up all the puzzles over aetiology and
symptoms but makes sense of so much else at Longwood which must
otherwise remain a dark mystery.
Napoleon exhibited all the symptoms of a person poisoned by arsenic:
heart palpitations, weak and irregular pulse, very severe headaches, icy
chills in the leg extending to the hips, back and shoulder pain, a
persistent dry cough, loosening teeth, coated tongue, pain in the liver,
severe thirst, skin rash, yellowed skin and whites of eyes, shivering,
deafness, sensitivity of eyes to light, spasmodic muscle contractions,
nausea, difficulty in breathing. His fat, glabrous body (even after months
of illness), with an absence of fine hairs on the surface, is another
indication. When the body becomes toxic, it is apt to clothe itself in fa t as
a kind of armour against poisons. But perhaps the most telling piece of
indirect evidence for arsenic poisoning is that when Napoleon's body was
about to be transferred from St Helena to its final resting place at I ,es