The invisible patient

Recently an auction house in Swindon sold for more than £11,000 a cracked tooth of Napoleon’s, extracted during his exile on St Helena. Although Napoleon did little except talk, write and dig and garden, his final six years have been the subject of more books than any other period of his life. It was recently announced that Al Pacino will play the dying Boney in a new feature film.

The memoirs of three of the four doctors who looked after him on St Helena have been published. This is the missing manuscript. Dr James Verling was a 31- year-old surgeon in the Royal Artillery appointed to the job in July 1818. He was given a room in the long, white, wooden bungalow called Longwood which Napoleon shared with his court. Many years later his journal was lost on a ship but it eventually found its way to the French National Archives. This publication is a transcript and commentary by the American Napoleonic historian J. David Markham.

The significance of Napoleon’s doctors’ testimonies is that the patient was only 52 when he died. In his will he wrote, ‘I am dying prematurely, murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.’ Imprisonment in the tropical climate of St Helena was, he claimed, a death sentence.

The first British doctor, Barry O’Meara — who pulled out that tooth — diagnosed liver disease and recommended that his patient be removed from the island. The governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, believed that O’Meara had been ‘turned’; Napoleon was acting, and the diagnosis was a plot to send him back to Europe. O’Meara was expelled from St Helena and dismissed from the navy. A second naval doctor named John Stokoe — a veteran of Copenhagen and Trafalgar — diagnosed chronic hepatitis, warning that if Napoleon stayed in the tropics he would die.