The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 273 No 7313 p268
21 August 2004

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Knives, malaria and celebrating Bart’s more
Taking a backward glance at motormania more
Encore le petit caporal: new arguments about how Napoleon died more

Knives, malaria and celebrating Bart’s

On 24 August the anniversary of St Bartholomew, one of the original 12 apostles, is celebrated. He is reputed to have been flayed and crucified in AD44, and his symbol is the knife.

The famous fair held in Bartholomew’s name took place at Smithfield on his anniversary each year from 1133 until 1752, when the reform of the calendar led to it being proclaimed on 3 September. From Smithfield the fair shifted to Islington in 1840 until its last appearance in 1855, when its name was altered to Caledonian Market. It was one of the great national fairs, which the Puritans vainly tried to suppress. One of its features was the consumption of roasted pig.

The hospital we associate with the name of Bartholomew was founded in 1123 by the royal courtier Rahere in fulfilment of a vow he had made after recovering from malaria contracted during a pilgrimage to Rome. It began as a priory of Augustinian canons. The priory and hospital were dissolved in 1539, but Henry VIII refounded the hospital in 1547. After its rebuilding 200 years later, it developed into the famous teaching hospital we know today.

Several customs are associate with St Bartholomew. At Croyland Abbey in Lincolnshire there was an ancient custom of giving visitors on 24 August miniature knives to celebrate. This habit was abolished during the time of Edward IV. It is recorded that many of these knives were recovered by collectors from the abbey ruins and the local river.

And in Sandwich, Kent, on 24 August the mayor visits the St Bartholomew’s Hospital almshouses to attend a memorial service for the founders. One of the 16 residents is chosen as “Master” by sticking a pin in a list of names. The local children race round the chapel and each receives a Bartholomew bun.

On a more sombre note, St Bartholomew’s Day was chosen in 1572 for the massacre of Huguenots in France at the instigation of Catherine de Medicis, Some 3,000 were slaughtered in Paris and throughout the country the total may have reached 70,000.

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Taking a backward glance at motormania

Our culture is afflicted by a craze for motoring that has been prevalent for over 200 years. As far back as 1789 Erasmus Darwin was prophesying: “Soon shall thy arm, unconquer’d steam afar / Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car.” Steam made way for the internal combustion engine and the pace of change quickened. By 1914 the classical don Alfred D. Godley was making fun of the motor bus with his doggerel: “Domine, defende nos / Contra hos Motores Bos!” Things moved fast, and George Bernard Shaw in ‘The apple cart” (1930) exclaimed: “What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?” Louis MacNeice commented in 1935: “Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car / For this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar.” And by 1964 Marshall McLuhan could bring the situation up to date by observing: “The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad and incomplete in the urban compound.”

This is a sad commentary on our tendency to place our trust ever increasingly in machines, whether they be mechanical or electronic, and our inability to exercise our own muscular and nervous equipment without technical assistance. We are told that many of us are obese because we take too little exercise. Yet we regularly find people driving their cars from the doorstep a mere hundred yards or so to post a letter. Having arrived at the post box we see people leaning from the car window to the letter slot without bothering to get out.

And to walk from a car park to a shop is something to be avoided. Small wonder that out-of-town superstores have grown into something of a menace, since they overcome both parking difficulties and any need to carry goods any distance. Our children expect to be conveyed to the school entrance and collected from the same doorstep. Even when visiting a beach, motorists expect to drive to high-water mark at high tide and even lower if the tide is out.

It is not surprising that our roads are becoming highly unpleasant. Drivers, especially young men, imagine they can move where they like as fast as they like. And there is a strange syndrome which we might call motormania which involves a powerful impulse to dominate everyone else when we are behind the steering wheel. To be in charge of a powerful machine invokes this syndrome, particularly if the machine has an aggressive design that makes it resemble a military tank rather than a car.

When you take into account the tendency of humans to consume alcohol or other drugs regardless of effects on the nervous system, the total picture is not reassuring. Moreover, our bondage to the car makes the trade in oil and other propellants assume a profile which politicians in particular cannot hope to ignore, and which makes the world a hazardous place to inhabit.

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Encore le petit caporal: new arguments about how Napoleon died

You might imagine that after arguments conducted since 1821 the tricky questions of how Napoleon Bonaparte died in the remote island of St Helena were safely placed at rest. But no — the arguments and counterarguments continue to this day, with only occasional intermissions. The official line has been that the former emperor died from cancer of the stomach, a condition that had killed his father before him. The diagnosis was made by Napoleon’s personal physician, Francesco Antommarchi, after an autopsy that was attended by five English doctors.

There was a suggestion, soon after his death, that Napoleon was in fact murdered by Count Charles de Montholon, one of his close confidants, at the prompting of the royalist faction in France, fearing that the emperor was planning another escape from banishment. Montholon was suspected of adding arsenic to the exile’s wine. This notion was later given some support by the discovery that a sample of hair collected from the dead man contained arsenic. However, it has been suggested that this arsenic was derived from the pigment of some wallpaper decorating Napoleon’s room in St Helena, although at the time many other sources might have been responsible, including the smoke from his fire.

A forensic pathologist in San Francisco has now added fuel to the discussion by blaming the medical attendants who treated Napoleon’s symptoms of illness with enemas of unknown composition and repeated doses of antimony potassium tartrate to induce vomiting. This treatment would have depleted the patient’s body potassium and induced a lethal heart condition of “torsades de pointes”. A purge of possibly 600mg of mercuric chloride, a massive overdose administered two days before death, might have been the ultimate insult.

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