The findings after death confirm the view of him as an unstable pituitocentric who succumbed to pituitary insufficiency toward the latter half of his life.  We possess the account of the postmortem by Dr. Henry, who performed it.  “The whole surface of the body was deeply covered with fat.  Over the sternum, where generally the bone is very superficial, the fat was upwards of an inch deep, and an inch and a half or two inches on the abdomen.  There was scarcely any hair on the body, and that of the head was thin, fine and silky.  The whole genital system (very small) seemed to exhibit a physical cause for the absence of sexual desire, and the chastity which had been stated to have characterized the deceased (during his stay at St. Helena).  The skin was noticed to be very white and delicate as were the hands and arms.  Indeed the whole body was slender and effeminate.  The pubis much resembled the Mons Veneris in women.  The muscles of the chest were small, the shoulders were narrow and the hips wide.”  In other words, the typical feminization of the body which accompanies pituitary insufficiency was found.  He died of a cancer of the stomach.  But before his death there were noted the mental transformations that succeed deficiency of his central endocrine.  Apathy, indolence, fatigability, and frilosity were what impressed his associates at St. Helena.  The deterioration of his mentality was also exemplified in his literary diversions, the “Siege of Troy” and the “Essay on Suicide.”  The puerility of these productions, as well as of his conduct, a sulking before his captors, and the decline of his physical energy, once a bottomless well, all point to the same conclusion.

The rise and fall of Napoleon followed the rise and fall of his pituitary gland.  No better illustration exists of the fundamental determination of a personality and its career by an endocrine, aside from other factors of education, environment, accident and opportunity.  Without the sort of endocrine equipment he was born with, however, none of the other factors would have found the material to work upon.  Born, say, with more of a posterior pituitary than he had, which would have rendered him more sensitive to the sufferings of his fellow-creatures, if nothing else, and the forces of the Revolution probably would have swamped him from the very first moment of his emergence at Toulon, when the whiff of grape-shot, symptom of an inexorable, merciless intellect and will, started him upon the road that led to the Napoleonic Era.  Destiny is always ironic.  For the deficiency of the internal secretions which made him eligible for glory was responsible as well as for his downfall.

EPILEPSY AND MIGRAINE IN GENIUS

In the annals of genius, there occur a number of instances of those who suffered from attacks that have been diagnosed epilepsy or migraine.  Because their ailment was associated with their extraordinary ability, they attracted an attention that concerned itself not at all with the circumstance that genius has also been liable to measles, scarlet fever, and so on.  Epilepsy and migraine certainly occur in people of no supernormal gifts, and often in degenerates and subnormals.  Yet the fact remains that these affections of the nervous system, so terrible to feel and to behold, have afflicted the finest brains of the race.