Tag: Napoleon Bonaparte
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The death of the Serenissima (1797)
To approve [Napoleon’s] demands, the Great Council was called for Friday 12 May. From soon after sunrise the people of Venice had been congregating in the Piazza, just as they had done countless times before in the city’s history. In the past, however, they had usually assembled for purposes of celebration. Never before had they…
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Napoleon’s final illness
JMS PearceHull, England Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the French island of Corsica on August 15, 1769. His colorful life, illnesses, and military exploits have been extensively recorded.1 On 17 October 1815, after the forty-five-year-old Napoleon’s famous defeat near Waterloo, the allies banished him to St. Helena, a subtropical island in the South Atlantic Ocean,…
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“My dear neoplasm:” Sigmund Freud’s oral cancer
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United states When the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, died in London early on the morning of September 23, 1939, he succumbed to what he wryly referred to as “my dear old cancer with which I have been sharing my existence for sixteen years.” Freud had been discovered to have carcinoma…
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Illness shapes the course of human events
K.N. LaiHong Kong, China These items, part of the Gerald Chow Memorial Lecture delivered to the Hong Kong College of Physicians, illustrate the many connections between medicine and the humanities, as well as exemplifying how illness shapes the course of human events and how even mild congenital anomalies may have catastrophic outcomes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt…
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Jean Corvisart: Napoleon’s physician
An outstanding diagnostician and pioneer in cardiology, Jean Nicolas Corvisart de Marets has been called the founder of French clinical medicine. He advocated the careful clinical examination of the heart, described syndromes and signs of heart disease that to this day still bear his name, and popularized percussion of the chest as a diagnostic tool,…
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Blood at Borodino
George DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States The year 2012 marks the 200th anniversary of Borodino, one of the bloodiest battles in the history of mankind. It pitted against each other two roughly matched adversaries, the armies of emperor Napoleon and Czar Alexander I, each boasting about 130,000 men and 600 guns. Having marched all the way…