Tag Archives: genitalia

Napoleon’s Penis

The surgical tool kit that was used to perform the autopsy on Napoleon’s body at Saint Helena is on display at the Museum of History of Medicine in Paris.
But few people know that those scalpels probably also emasculated the Emperor.

In his last few months on Saint Helena, Napoleon suffered from excruciating stomach pains. Sir Hudson Lowe, the governor of the island under whose control Bonaparte had been confined, dismissed the whole thing as a slight anemia. Yet on May 5, 1821 Bonaparte died.
The autopsy conducted the following day by Napoleon’s personal physician, Francesco Carlo Antommarchi, revealed that he had been killed by a stomach tumor, aggravated by large ulcers (although the actual causes of death have been debated).
But during the autoptic examination Antommarchi apparently took some liberties.

Francesco Carlo Antommarchi

The heart was extracted and put in in a vase filled with spirit; it was meant to be delivered to the Emperor’s second wife, Maria Luisa, in Parma. In reality, she must have been hardly impressed by such a token of love, since a few months after Napoleon’s death she already married her lover. The stomach, that cancerous organ responsible for Napoleon’s death, was also removed and preserved in liquid. Antommarchi then made a cast of Bonaparte’s face, from which he later produced the famous death mask displayed at the Musée de l’Armée.

But at this point the doctor from Marseilles decided he’d grab a further, macabre trophy: he severed Napoleon’s penis. Antommarchi’s motives for this extra cut are unclear. Some speculate it might have been some sort of revenge for the way the irascible Napoleon mistreated him in the last few months; according to other sources, the doctor (sometimes described as an ignorant and disrespectful man) simply thought he could make a profit out of it.

But perhaps it was not even Antommarchi who took the controversial specimen. Thirty years later, in 1852, Mamluk Ali (Louis-Etienne Saint-Denis, Napoleon’s most faithful valet) published a memorial in the Revue des Mondes. In the article, Ali attributed the responsibility of this mutilation to himself and to Abbot Angelo Paolo Vignali, the chaplain who administered extreme unction to Bonaparte. He stated that he and Vignali had removed some unspecified “portions” of Napoleon’s corpse during the autopsy.

All these stories are quite dubious; it seems unlikely that such a disfigurement could go unnoticed. Five English doctors, plus three English and three French officers, were present at Napoleon’s autopsy. After the embalming, his faithful waiter Marchand dressed his body in uniform. How come no one noticed the absence of manhood on the body of the “little corporal”?

In any case,  what may or may not have been Napoleon’s true penis, but a penis nonetheless, began to circulate in Europe.
And even if it’s unclear who was responsible for severing it, in the end it was chaplain Vignali who smuggled it back to Corsica, along with more conventional mementos (documents and letters, a few pieces of silverware, a lock of hair, a pair of breeches, etc.), and the organ passed to his heirs upon Vignali’s death in a bloody vendetta in 1828. It remained in the family for almost a century, and was finally purchased by an anonymous buyer at an auction in 1916, together with the entire collection. In the auction catalog, the penis was described with a euphemism: “mummified tendon“.

After being bought by the famous antiquarian bookstore Maggs of London, the lot was resold in 1924 to Philadelphia collector Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach, who exhibited it three years later at the Museum of French Art in New York. Here the penis of Napoleon was on public display for the first and only time, and a jouranlist described it as a “maltreated strip of buck-skin shoelace or a shriveled eel“.

In 1944 Rosenbach sold the collection once again, and it continued to be passed from hand to hand. But despite the historical value of these memorabilia the market proved to be less and less interested, and the Vignali collection remained unsold at various auctions. In 1977 a major part of the collection was acquired by the French government, and destined to join the remains of Napoleon at Les Invalides. Not the penis, however, which the French refused to even acknowledge. It was John K. Lattimer, an American urologist, who bought it for $ 4,000. His intention, it seems, was to permanently remove it from circulation so that it would not be ridiculed.

The urologist had amassed an impressive collection of macabre historical curiosities – from the blood-stained collar that President Lincoln wore on the night of his murder at Ford’s theater, to one of the poison capsules Göring used to commit suicide. Lattimer kept the infamous “mummified tendon” locked away in a suitcase under his bed for years, protecting it from the public’s morbid curiosity, and he always refused any purchase proposal. He X-rayed the specimen, and it turned out to actually be a human penis.

After Lattimer’s death in 2007, his daughter took on the laborious task of archiving this incredible collection.
The penis is still part of the collection: Tony Perrottet, author of the book Napoleon’s Privates, is among the very few who have had the opportunity to see it in person. “It was kind of an amazing thing to behold. There it was: Napoleon’s penis sitting on cotton wool, very beautifully laid out, and it was very small, very shriveled, about an inch and a half long. It was like a little baby’s finger.”
Here is the video showing the moment when the writer finally found himself face to face with the illustrious genitals:

Perrottet was not given permission to film the actual penis at the time, but in a 2015 reading he exhibited an alleged replica, which you can see below.

One can understand Perrottet’s obvious excitation in the video: the author declared that, to him, Napoleon’s penis is the symbol “of everything that’s interesting about history. It sort of combines love and death and sex and tragedy and farce all in this one story“. And certainly all these elements do contribute to the fascination we feel for such a relic, which is at once comic, macabre, obscene and titillating. But there’s more.

The body of a man who – for better or for worse – so profoundly changed the history of the world, possesses an almost magical aura. Why then does the thought of it being disrespected and desecrated provoke an unmentionable, subtle satisfaction? Why did Lattimer fear that showing that small, withered and mummified penis would result in public derision?

Perhaps it’s because that little piece of meat looks like a masterpiece of irony, a perfect retaliation.
As comedian George Carlin put it,

men are terrified that their pricks are inadequate and so they have to compete with one another to feel better about themselves and since war is the ultimate competition, basically, men are killing each other in order to improve their self-esteem. You don’t have to be a historian or a political scientist to see the Bigger Dick foreign policy theory at work.

George Carlin, Jammin’ In New York (1992)

The controversial POTUS tweet (01/03/2018) on who might have the “bigger button”.

On the other hand, this relic also reminds us that Napoleon was mortal, after all, and brings his figure back to the concreteness of a corpse on the autopsy table. The mummified penis takes the place of that hominem te memento (“Remember that you are only a man”) that was repeated in the ear of Roman generals returning from a victory so they wouldn’t get a big head, or the sic transit that the protodeacon pronounced at the passage in San Pietro of the newly elected Pope (“thus passes the glory of the world”).

That flap of shrunken and withered skin is at once a symbol of vanitas, and a mockery of the typical machismo so often exhibited by leaders and rulers. It reminds us that “the Emperor has no clothes”.
Worse: he has no clothes, no life, and no manhood.

Part of the informations in this article come from Bess Lovejoy’s wonderful book Rest In Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses (2014).
One chapter of my book Paris Mirabilia is devoted to the Museum of History of Medicine.
Tony Perrottet’s Napoleon’s Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped is essentially a collection of spicy anecdotes about famous historical figures. Among these, one in particular is relevant. During the WWII, Stalin asked Winston Churchill to help out with the Russian army’s “serious condom shortage”. The British Prime Minister had a special batch of extra-large condoms prepared, then sent them to Russia with the label “Made in Britain – Medium“. This glaring example of foreign policy would have delighted George Carlin.

Vagina dentata

The Latin expression vagina dentata defines one of the most ancient archetypes of mankind: mythical representations of female genitalia equipped with ferocious dentition can be found in very different cultures and traditions.

In what can be read as an early warning against the dangers of the vagina, Hesiod recounts how, even before being born, Chronos castrated his understably surprised father Uranus from inside his mother Gaia’s vulva. In many other mythological tales, the hero on his quest has to pass through the gigantic vagina, armed with teeth, of a goddess: this happens in the Maori foundation myths, as well as in those of the Chaco tribes of Paraguay, or the Guyanese people. From North America populations to South East Asia, this monstrous menace was a primal fear. In Europe, particularly in Ireland and Grat Britain, cathedrals and castle fortifications sported the Sheela na Gig, gargoyles showing oversized, unsettling vulvas.

As you can guess, this myth is linked to an exquisitely masculine unconscious terror, so much so that Sigmund Freud interpreted it as a symbol of castration anxiety, that fear every male adolescent feels when first confronted with the female reproductive organ. Others see it as an allegory of the frustration of masculine vigor, which in a sexual intercourse enters “triumphantly” and always leaves “diminished”. In this sense, it is clear how the vagina dentata might be related to the ancient theme of the puella venenata (the “poisonous girl”), to other myths such as the succubus (which was perhaps meant to explain nocturnal emissions), and female spermophagus figures, who feed on men’s vital force, as for example the Mesopotamian demon Lilith.

The history of the vagina dentata, which was sometimes told to children, could have also served as a deterrent against molesters or occasional sex. Even in recent times, during the Vietnam War, a legend circulated among American troops regarding Viet Cong prostitutes who allegedly inserted razor blades or broken glass in their intimate parts, with the intent of mutilating those unwary soldiers who engaged in sex.

What few people know is that, in a purely theoretical way, a toothed vagina could be biologically possible. Dermoid cysts are masses of specialized cells; if these cells end up in the wrong part of the body, they can grow hair, bones or teeth. Inguinal dermoid cysts, however, do not localize in the vaginal area, but usually near ovaries. And even in the implausible scenario of a complete dentition being produced, the teeth would be incapsulated inside the cyst’s own tissue anyway.

Therefore, despite stories on the internet about mysterious “medical cases” of internal cysts growing teeth that pierce the uterus walls, in reality the vagina dentata remains just a fascinating myth.

As expected, this uncanny idea has been exploited in the movies: the most recent case is the comedy horror film Teeth (2007, directed by M. Lichtenstein), the story of a young girl who finds out her private parts behave rather aggressively during intercourse. Less ambitious, and more aware of the humorous potential of its subject matter, is the Japanese B-movie Sexual Parasite: Killer Pussy (2004, by T. Nakano).

In Tokyo Gore Police (2008, by Y. Nishimura) a mutant girl grows a crocodile mandible in place of her thighs:

Many great authors have written about vagina dentata, including the great Tommaso Landolfi, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, Neil Gaiman, Mario Vargas Llosa and others.