Closing in on Napoleon’s secret

In his later portraits, and in so many caricatures, Napoleon is shown with his hand tucked in his jacket, holding his stomach. Turns out he may have had a good reason for doing so. Modern research indicates that those who autopsied Napoleon immediately after his death were right — he had gastric cancer and one heck of a horrible lesion:

An autopsy at the time determined that stomach cancer was the cause of his death. But some arsenic found in 1961 in the ruler’s hair sparked rumors of poisoning. Had Napoleon escaped exile, he could have changed the balance of power in Europe; therefore murder speculations didn’t seem outlandish.

However, a new study–combining current medical knowledge, autopsy reports, Bonaparte’s physician memoirs, eyewitness accounts, and family medical histories–found that gastrointestinal bleeding was the immediate cause of death.

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The original autopsy descriptions indicated that Bonaparte’s stomach had two ulcerated lesions: a large one on the stomach and a smaller one that had pierced through the stomach wall and reached the liver.

Genta and his colleagues compared the description of these lesions with current images of 50 benign ulcers and 50 gastric cancers and found that the emperor’s lesions were cancerous.

“It was a huge mass from the entrance of his stomach to the exit. It was at least 10 centimeters [4 inches] long.” Genta said. “Size alone suggests the lesion was cancer.”

Napoleon may have been a power hungry megalomaniac, but he was also one of the great military geniuses in history, and someone who lit a candle in many dark corners all over Europe. It was he, for example, who ended the Jewish ghettoes, sparking an extraordinary Jewish European renaissance that lasted up until the Holocaust.

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