ST HELENA - ARNOTT (DR ARCHIBALD)

Autograph letter signed ("Arch Arnott") to Lieutenant General Sir Hudson Lowe ("Sir"), reporting on Napoleon's final illness, April 1821

Footnotes

Provenance:
Collections of Dawson Turner & J.B. Heath sale, Sotheby's, 28 October 1957
Bibliothèque impériale de Dominique de Villepin, Pierre Bergé, Drouot, Paris, 19 March 2008, lot 329
Private collection

'HE HAS HOWEVER EATEN ALMOST NOTHING TODAY & HAD SOME SICKNESS': Napoleon's doctor reports to the Governor of St Helena.

Every detail of Napoleon's life was under intense scrutiny during his exile and no more so than during his final illness from March 1821 until his death on 5 May. Archibald Arnott, a surgeon to the 20th regiment and encamped with them on Deadwood Plain, had taken over as Napoleon's physician shortly before our letter was written and was obliged to report back daily to the Governor, Sir Hudson Lowe. The previous doctor, the Corsican Dr Antommarchi, had been summarily dismissed for the final time by Napoleon himself just the day before our letter, after giving him a painful double-dose of emetic, and Arnott became his only trusted physician. Napoleon had a general distrust of the medical profession as a whole - General Bertrand in his Cahiers de Saint-Hélène, Le 500 dernier jours (1820-1821) wrote that on the 21 April Napoleon commented as he was completing his will that he 'would soon be in the company of the greats... People will not say that doctors cured me. Rather they delayed my arrival...'.

Much has been written about the death of Napoleon and there has been much speculation over whether he was deliberately poisoned with arsenic or whether he died of stomach cancer or a myriad of other conditions including malaria, tuberculosis and syphilis. On first examining the patient Arnott reported back to Lowe that Napoleon was suffering nothing more than hypochondriasis – the full seriousness of his physical illness not becoming apparent to him until the end of April - and has been criticised for his treatment, in particular for giving him a possibly-fatal dose of calomel. However, Arnott's final conclusion that he died of stomach cancer is now widely accepted.

A detailed daily report of this time, including intimate details of the post-mortem was published by Archibald Arnott in 1822 and is included in the lot. The entry for 22 April echoes the sentiments in our letter - 'On the morning of the 22d of April he felt a sensation of heat, with dryness in the stomach, and a sense of suffocation... what came off his stomach was shown to me, it was a something he had eaten the day before, quite undigested... After the vomiting, his stomach was much relieved and he conceived himself better on the whole...'.

The letter is almost certainly from a cache of eight sold at Sotheby's on 28 October 1957 from the collections of Dawson Turner and J. B. Heath. A previous catalogue for the sale of the Dawson Turner Library in June 1859 confirmed that Turner purchased many items from 'Mr Brown, Bookseller of Holborn' who in turn had purchased them direct from Sir Hudson Lowe's son.