Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Arsenic Poison Didn't Kill Napoleon

Another myth bites the dust.

A new study by physicists at INFN in Milano-Bicocca and Pavia, Italy, has shown that there's no difference in the arsenic level in Napoleon's hair during his last days when compared to when he was a child. This means that he wasn't deliberately poisoned by arsenic during his last days. Instead, it was more likely that it was due to a lifetime's worth of exposure to arsenic.

Zz.

2 comments:

Wired Educator said...
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Kent Leung said...

Good study (as I work at a research reactor as well ;) but I wonder how clean their samples were. I mean, how do you manage to get samples of Napoleon's hair at different stages in his life! Too many assumptions for this conclusion to be bullet-proof I think...