Monday, Jan. 19, 1948

The Greater Fear

Napoleon's foolhardy bravery is an old story to most schoolboys. "Forward, comrades!" cried the Little Corporal at the battle of Montereau. "The cannon ball that will hit me has not been cast!"

Napoleon was unafraid of cannon because he was afraid of something else: cancer. So says Esther H. Vincent, librarian at Northwestern Medical School, in the current Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, official journal of the American College of Surgeons. Writes Miss Vincent: "This fixed idea that he would die from cancer of the stomach saved [Napoleon] from fear of death in any other form. Wounded in battle, he took no heed, for he knew he would not die from bullets. His belief in his charmed life was not fearlessness [nor] faith in his 'miraculous invulnerability,' but certainty that death could touch him in one way only. Upon realizing the imminence of defeat at Waterloo, he deliberately put himself in the way of bullets, hoping to defy fate."

Death from gastric cancer, Napoleon was convinced, ran in his family. His grandfather, Joseph Bonaparte, died of that disease at the age of 40; so did his father, Charles, at 39. Napoleon did not like to talk about cancer but he could not conceal his fear, Miss Vincent declares: he had "a queer interest" in anatomy, particularly the anatomy of the stomach.

As Emperor he took private anatomy lessons from Court Physician Jean Nicolas Corvisart, but the lessons made him feel ill; often he asked doctors for some assurance that disease could not be inherited. On St. Helena, a month before his death, he returned to questions about the anatomy and physiology of the stomach. As he was dying, the hidden fear erupted in his delirium: "My father . . . the pylorus ... I have known it for a long time."

A perforation near the pylorus (the stomach's opening into the small intestine) showed up in the autopsy on Napoleon; the internal surface of the stomach was "practically covered by a cancerous mass, as were all of the lymph nodes."

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