NAPOLEON'S END.

Clutha Leader, Volume XXXIX, Issue 56, 25 February 1913, Page 8

NAPOLEON'S END.

NEW : LIGHT Ofij HIS DISEASE.

The story of a game,of cross-purposes —of a veritable tragedy of er^or —is told by/ Dr. Chaplin, a Fellow of the Hoyal College of Physicians and M.D. of Cambridge, in his remarkable little •tudy from the medical standpoint of "Tbe. Wness and Death of Napoleon Bonaparte," which is just published. For the> first time he presents in the light of modern knowledge "a true account" of the closing days of the agony in St. Helena. He has laid the work! under a debt by examining the original records of the confidential medical reports, contained in the Lowe Papers in the British Museum. These differ in important details from the published statements. Dr. Chaplin's conclusion is that "Napoleon suffered in the first instance from a chronic ulcer of the stomach, from the edges of which a cancer developed about seven or eight months before his death." There are strong reasons, as he shows, for believing that Napoleon was not suffering from cancer, as has hitherto been generally believed, throughout his illness of three years aud seven mouths'. The probable date at which the cancer began is fixed from the Emperor's symptoms in October, 1820. Fear of Feigned Illness. The pitiful feature of the story is that the doctors who attended Napoleon were divided by political bias into two opposite camps. Thus they diagnosed his illness wrongly and treated it mistakenly. Autommarchi. for ex-am-ple, administered emetics which must have inflicted excruciating pain. The British doctors would have it that there was little or nothing wrong with Napoleon and that his disease was "diplomatic." They may have made an honest mistake, or more probably they may have feared punishment and dismissal it they told the truth. Sir Hudson Lowe, who was entrusted with the guardianship of Napoleon, seems to have believed that they were telling the truth. And in favor of the British official theory that Napoleon was not really ill was the treacherous statement made by Napoleon's comrade, Gourgaud, to the British Government that Napoleon's illness was feigned. To this statement of Gourgaud's Dr Chaplin nowhere alludes, yet it is the key to much that is apparently heartless in Lowe's conduct. So far did the doctors carry their bias that they denied Napoleon was wasting away when he was worn to a shadow, and Dr Arnott even declared only three weeks before his death that His complaint was "hypochondriasis."