others to sign; because he lacked seniority, his own signature did not
appear on the document. Henry was the man who first divulged (in a
private report for Hudson Lowe in 1823) the story that Napoleon had
abnormally small genitals, and the idea has proved remarkably popular
since, answering as it does a bastardized conception of the idea of
compensation - great man, small member, etc. But Henry had a
pronounced animus against Napoleon and, in any case, strangely finds all
Bonaparte's organs small -hands, feet, bladder, heart. Since this is the
man to whose report the British surgeons appended their signature, it is
not surprising that there is no mention of a large liver.
Many later writers have soared away into the empyrean of the
imagination on the basis of Henry's 'observations' and found evidence for
sexual infantilism, pituitary failure and much else. But, unlike the
situation with Hitler's monorchism, it is improbable that rumour and
reality coincide on this issue. As a man who liked to portray himself as a
rough and ready soldier, Napoleon several times appeared in the nude in
the presence of his troops, most recently in the 1814 campaign. His
frequent smutty talk and general sexual profile scarcely suggest a man
with a shameful secret to hide. Gourgaud records in his diary for 26
October 1817 that Napoleon said: 'If ever O'Meara writes a diary, it will
be very interesting. If he gives the length of my - , this would be even
more interesting.' This hardly sounds like a man worried that posterity
would laugh at him, and indeed O'Meara did produce a journal and made
no use of this 'astounding revelation'. Besides, even if we could imagine a
substantially underendowed man as a compulsive womanizer - which
Napoleon was - his bedmates would surely have spoken of this
interesting aspect of his anatomy. Josephine and his mistresses did on
occasion complain about his sexual performance, but only because he
insisted on completing the act at such astonishing speed- expeditiously,
is the standard euphemism.
Since the British surgeons' observations were either distorted or
constrained by political expediency, the verdict of death by cancer hardly
convinces in terms of the calibre of the alleged witnesses. What of the
case history itself? Here the great stumbling block to the cancer theorists
is Napoleon's obesity, since it is well known that death from this disease
is almost invariably preceded by extreme emaciation. Yet both post
mortem reports (Antommarchi's and that signed by the British surgeons)
speak of a layer of fat covering the entire body, with particularly large
amounts around the chest and heart. This in turn has suggested to certain
medical observers a quite different explanation for Napoleon's illness and
death.
marcin
(Marcin)
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