There are a number of word portraits of Napoleon extant.  But for our purposes certain of the notable features of his face and physique are to be considered.  The first characteristic that struck everyone about him was the matter of his height.  He was definitely sub-average, at death being about five feet six inches in height.  As has been emphasized several times, deficiency or excess of growth will always direct attention to the pituitary.  His sharply outlined features and a powerful lower jaw, combined with oddly small plump hands, long straight black hair, and dark complexion, all point to the pituitary, with a secondary adrenal effect.  His pulse was slow, according to Corvisart, his personal physician, rarely above 50 to the minute.  His sexual life, his libido, was abnormal.  Curiously explosive in their appearance and manifestations were his sexual impulses.  They “beset him on occasions which were sometimes inconvenient, and a peculiarity about them was that they subsided with equal suddenness if not immediately gratified, or if meanwhile something occurred to discourage his attention.  All women were to him ‘filles de joie.’  Sexual rather than social attractions in women appealed to him.”  He was never in love, never possessed of permanent affection or tenderness for any woman.  This explosive periodicity of the sexual life, “with a tendency to compression of it to the merely physical,” is another mark of some pituitary-centered personalities.

Two other phenomena that persisted throughout his life throw light upon his endocrine constitution.  One was trouble with his bladder which he told Antommarchi, another physician, bothered him as long as he could remember.  Irritability of the bladder was so pronounced that he could not sleep for more than a few hours at a time.  After battles, the trouble became worse so that it interfered with his riding.  Constitutional difficulties in urination have been connected definitely with the function of the pituitary.  The other pituitary disturbances which tinctured his life were certain “brain storms,” attacks of vomiting followed by “stupor verging on unconsciousness” brought on by outbursts of temper, physical overexertion, mental strain, or sexual excitement.  It has been shown that such epileptic tendencies are present in subjects of pituitary disease, particularly those with pituitary instability.  In Napoleon’s case the brain attacks may have been crises of pituitary insufficiency in a hyper-pituitary type.  This supposition is borne out by the headache which followed them, the headache of an oversecreting pituitary compensating for a defect in its formation.  During his prime, his intellect was mathematical, logical, and rational, and remarkable for a prodigious memory.  Such an intellect is the product of an extraordinary ante-pituitary.  That he never permitted feeling to interfere with the dictates of his judgment, a quality which rendered him the most unscrupulous careerist of history, must