Intestinal Perfidy?

At a dinner given by Britain's Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1927, the college's president, Sir Berkeley Moynihan, took aside France's Professor Rene Leriche to show him a unique and little-known specimen. It was a sealed glass tube containing a piece of small intestine with a hole in it. Surgeon Leriche made an on-the-spot diagnosis: perforation caused by a tropical disease. Confided Moynihan proudly: "It is Napoleon's intestine."

Leriche protested increduously that Napoleon was commonly thought to have died of stomach cancer. Just then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the evening's guest of honor, caught sight of the college's collection of pickled viscera and got sick to his stomach. The conversation ended abruptly.

Last week in the French weekly Arts, Professor Leriche, now 76, reported that Sir Berkeley had said just enough to upset the generally accepted theory that Napoleon's death on St. Helena was caused by cancer. Did the British impose the cancer theory to conceal something? The magazine's sinister conclusion: Napoleon may have died of a tropical disease, brought on by his British jailers' refusal to supply him with adequate quarters and sufficient drainage. Napoleon's intestine cannot be produced to test the theory: it was destroyed by a German bomb in 1941.

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