For decades, scholars and scientists have argued that Napoleon, who died in 1821 on the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, was the victim of arsenic, whether by accident or design.
The murder theory held that his British captors poisoned him; the accident theory said that colored wallpaper in his bedroom contained an arsenic-based dye that mold transformed into poisonous fumes.
But now, a team of scientists at Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Milan-Bicocca and Pavia has uncovered strong evidence to the contrary. They conducted a detailed analysis of hairs taken from Napoleon's head at four times in his life -- as a boy in Corsica, during his exile on the island of Elba, the day he died on St. Helena, at age 51, and the day afterward -- and discovered that the arsenic levels underwent no significant rises.
Casting a wide net, the scientists also studied hairs from his son, Napoleon II, and his wife, Empress Josephine. They found that the arsenic levels were similar and uniformly high.
The big surprise was that the old levels were about 100 times the readings that the scientists obtained for comparison from the hairs of living people.
A team of 10 scientists reported their results in a recent issue of the Italian journal Il Nuovo Saggiatore (the New Experimenter).
A basic element, arsenic in small doses can stimulate the metabolism. In 1780, when Napoleon was a boy, it debuted as a fashionable medicine. Scientists say the body can tolerate fairly large doses of arsenic if the poison is ingested regularly. That appears to be the case with Napoleon and his family.
"All the important people in those times received excessive contamination," said Ettore Fiorini, a team member at the University of Milan-Bicocca. "It was widely used in paints, tapestry, medicine and even the preservation of food."
