Doctors killed Napoleon

• Napoleon Bonaparte was not murdered, but was killed by his overenthusiastic doctors, according to a study of records from the emperor's final weeks.
• This was the verdict of an autopsy by his personal physician, Francesco Antommarchi, which was observed by five English doctors.
• Montholon could have poisoned the emperor by putting arsenic in his wine - an idea that was bolstered by the discovery of arsenic in locks of Napoleon's hair collected after his death.
• Now forensic pathologist Steven Karch at the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Department and his team have come up with the idea that it was medical misadventure that finished Napoleon off.
• This, combined with regular doses of antimony potassium tartrate to make him vomit, would have left his body seriously short of potassium, which can lead to a lethal heart condition called "torsades de pointes" in which bouts of rapid heartbeats disrupt blood flow to the brain.
• Any arsenic in Napoleon's body, which may have come from coal smoke and other sources in the environment, would also have predisposed him to torsades, but on its own is unlikely to have pushed him over the edge, Karch says.
• The final straw was probably 600 milligrams of mercuric chloride given as a purge.
• This was five times the normal dose, and would have depleted his potassium levels further.
• None of this convinces Phil Corso, a retired doctor from Connecticut who is a strong proponent of the cancer theory.
• Napoleon had clearly been ill for a long time and his doctors are unlikely to have made much of a difference, Corso says.