Barry O'Meara

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Barry Edward O'Meara had an unusual vantage point on one of history's most scrutinized prisoners. As surgeon aboard the ship on which Napoleon surrendered himself, O'Meara watched the former emperor of France transform from conqueror to captive. He was an Irish physician, a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, and before long he became Napoleon's personal doctor on the remote island of Saint Helena. What happened there, and what O'Meara did about it, would make him one of the most controversial figures in the story of Napoleon's final years. The questions worth asking are these: what did O'Meara see on Saint Helena that no one else would say out loud, and what did he do with that knowledge?

• 2. The Ship and the Island

  ›

  Napoleon's surrender placed O'Meara in a position that no other physician had occupied before. He was already serving as ship's surgeon when the emperor came aboard, which gave him an intimacy with Napoleon that came not from appointment but from circumstance. When Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena, O'Meara accompanied him and took on the role of his physician. Saint Helena was a deliberately remote choice for a prisoner the British government wanted kept far from the reach of admirers and conspirators. For O'Meara, it meant being present at a scene that the wider world could only hear about secondhand. He was also, it turned out, writing about it in two very different ways.

• 3. Two Accounts, One Island

  ›

  From Saint Helena, O'Meara sent clandestine letters to a clerk at the Admiralty in London. These were not official dispatches but secret communications, written and transmitted without the knowledge of those overseeing Napoleon's captivity. They recorded Napoleon's state of mind as a prisoner, and they documented the specific grievances Napoleon held against his British captors and against the island's governor. Years later, in 1822, O'Meara published Napoleon in Exile, or A Voice From St. Helena, drawing on his direct experience. That book named Sir Hudson Lowe and charged him plainly with mistreating the former emperor. The publication created, as contemporaries noted, no small sensation. The secret letters and the published book together form an unusual double record, one private and one very public, of the same confined world.

• 4. Napoleon's Physician

  ›

  O'Meara performed what is recorded as the very first medical operation ever carried out on Napoleon: the extraction of a wisdom tooth in the autumn of 1817. The detail is small but telling. Of all the surgeons and physicians who attended Napoleon across his decades of campaigns, court life, and final captivity, O'Meara was the one who held the distinction of that first procedure. His access was genuine and sustained, not a brief or ceremonial encounter. The secret letters O'Meara sent to London drew on exactly that proximity, offering observers at the Admiralty a window into Napoleon's complaints and frame of mind that no official report would have captured in the same way.

• 5. After Saint Helena

  ›

  O'Meara lived long enough to become a founding member of the Reform Club, an institution whose name signals where his politics had settled by the time of his death in 1836. His granddaughter, Kathleen O'Meara, became a Catholic writer based in Paris, carrying his name into a later generation on the continent that had once been Napoleon's domain. On screen, his story reached a new audience in 1972, when the Anglo-American historical drama Eagle in a Cage cast Michael Williams in the role. The film brought the Saint Helena years back into view and gave O'Meara a face for viewers who had never opened Napoleon in Exile. The book itself remains the primary reason his name survived at all.