A group of physicists from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics of Italy (INFN), the universities of Milan and Pavia, has prepared a study in which it finally rejects the hypothesis of Napoleon Bonaparte's malicious poisoning by arsenic during his exile on St. Helena. Conclusions of scientists will publish the journal Il Nuovo Saggiatore, the synopsis of the article leads the newspaper The Telegraph.

Physicists compared the different strands of Bonaparte hair (cut off in his childhood in Corsica, at maturity - at the time of exile to Elba Island, the day after his death on St. Helena), his son and wife - the Empress Josephine, as well as the ten people living these days. Samples were studied with the help of neutron activation analysis, which allows to establish with a high accuracy the chemical composition of hair.

As it turned out, the hair of Napoleon and his relatives contain arsenic a hundred times more than the hair of our contemporaries.

At the same time, the amount of arsenic in the strands of the emperor, cut off when he was a child, does not differ from the amount that is found in the posthumous sample of his hair.

A study of Italian physicists gives one more indirect confirmation of the hypothesis that the cause of Bonaparte's death was gastric cancer. In an article published in 2007 in the journal Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology, scientists suggested that the predisposition to this disease in Napoleon was increased by a meager army diet, consisting mainly of corned beef.

Medicinform. Net.

Keywords:.