Old Sac

The fatal illness of William the Conqueror, who died on Sept. 9, 1087, was finally diagnosed last week. After studying the records, Frances Tomlinson Gardner of the University of California Medical School's department of medical history and bibliography decided that the man who conquered England was conquered by peritonitis. Previous historians had been content with vague references to "internal injuries."

William's difficulties probably started with diet, says Miss Gardner in Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics. Like most people in the Middle Ages, he ate too much in summer and too little in winter; that, plus lack of sanitary arrangements in his castle, helped produce constipation in a colon already sluggish. He got fat, a diverticulum or sac developed in the colon, and the sac became inflamed.

Then, during the pillage of Mantes, William's horse, stumbled and threw him against the pommel of the saddle. That did it. The injured sac became gangrenous and William, at 59 an old man by medieval standards, could not combat the infection. At last the sac ruptured, Miss Gardner believes, and peritonitis developed. One consolation: even if William's doctors had known what was the matter with him, they wouldn't have known what to do; they had no sulfonamide drugs and no techniques for abdominal surgery.

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