(F)orensic 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. Every day the doctors gave Napoleon an enema to relieve his symptoms. “They used really big, nasty syringe-shaped things,” Karch says. 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.

Ghoulish as it may be, medical forensics just fascinates me.